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“Three-Bladed Doom”

Short version (24,000 words) published in REH: Lone Star Fictioneer, #4 (Spring 1976).
Long version (42,000 words) published in Three-Bladed Doom, 1977.
Both versions had their beginning and ending substantially re-written by Byron Roark, editor of REH: Lone Star Fictioneer.
The restored version was printed in the fanzine REH: Two-Gun Raconteur, #10 (Winter 2006).
L. Sprague DeCamp re-wrote this into the Conan story “The Flame Knife” (first printed in the hardback Tales of Conan, 1955).

Frontispiece of the 1977 version.

Contents

Chapter One

Knives in the Dark

It was the scruff of swift and stealthy feet in the darkened doorway he had just passed that warned Gordon. He wheeled with catlike quickness just in time to see a tall figure lunge at him from that black arch. It was dark in the narrow, alley-like street, but Gordon glimpsed a fierce bearded face, the gleam of steel in the lifted hand, even as he avoided the blow with a twist of his whole body. The knife ripped his shirt and before the attacker could recover his balance, the American caught his arm and crashed the long barrel of his heavy pistol down on the fellow’s head. The man crumpled to the earth without a sound.

Gordon stood above him, listening with tense expectancy. Up the street, around the next corner, he heard the shuffle of sandalled feet, the muffled clink of steel. They told him the nighted streets of Kabul were a death-trap for Francis Xavier Gordon. He hesitated, half lifting the big gun, then shrugged his shoulders and hurried down the street, swerving wide of the dark arches that gaped in the walls which lined it. He turned into another, wider street, and a few moments later rapped softly on a door above which burned a brass lantern.

The door opened almost instantly and Gordon stepped quickly inside.

“Lock the door!”

The tall bearded Afridi who had admitted the American shot home the heavy bolt, and turned, tugging his beard perturbedly as he inspected his friend.

“Your shirt is gashed, El Borak!” he rumbled.

“A man tried to knife me,” answered Gordon. “Others followed me. ”

The Afridi’s fierce eyes blazed and he laid a sinewy hand on the three-foot Khyber knife that jutted from his hip. “Let us sally forth and slay the dogs, sahib!” he urged.

Gordon shook his head. He was not a large man, but his appearance was impressive. Thick chest, corded neck and square shoulders presented a compactness which hinted at almost primordial strength and endurance, and he moved with a supple ease that betrayed capabilities for blinding quickness.

“Let them go. They’re the enemies of Baber Khan, who knew that I went to the Amir tonight to urge him to pardon the man. ”

“And what said the Amir?”

“He’s determined on Baber Khan’s destruction. The chief’s enemies have poisoned the Amir against him, and then Baber Khan’s stubborn. He’s refused to come to Kabul and answer charges of sedition. The Amir swears he’ll march within the week and lay Khor in ashes and take Baber Khan’s head, unless the chief comes in voluntarily and surrenders. Baber Khan’s enemies don’t want him to do that. They know the charges they’ve made against him wouldn’t stand up, with me defending his case. That’s why they’re trying to put me out of the way, but they don’t dare strike openly.

“I’m going to see if I can’t persuade Baber Khan to come in and surrender. ”

“That the chief of Khor will never do,” predicted the Afridi.

“Probably not. But I’m going to try, Baber Khan is my friend. Wake Ahmed Shah and get the horses ready while I throw a pack together. We’re starting for Khor right away. ”

The Afridi did not comment on night-travel in the Hills, or mention the lateness of the hour. Men who rode with El Borak were accustomed to hard riding at all ungodly hours.

“What of the Sikh?” he asked as he turned away.

“He remains at the palace. The Amir trusts Lal Singh more than his own guards, and wants to keep him as a body-guard for awhile. He’s been nervous ever since the Sultan of Turkey was murdered by that fanatic. Hasten, Yar Ali Khan. Baber Khan’s enemies are probably watching the house, but they don’t know about that door that lets into the alley behind the stables. We’ll slip out that way. ”

The huge Afridi strode into an inner chamber and shook the man sleeping there on a heap of carpets.

“Awaken, son of Shaitan. We ride westward. ” Ahmed Shah, a stocky Yusufzai, sat up, yawning.

“Where?”

“To the Ghilzai village of Khor, where the rebel dog Baber Khan will doubtless cut out all our hearts,” growled Yar Ali Khan.

Ahmed Shah grinned broadly as he rose.

“You have no love for Ghilzai; but he is El Borak’s friend. ”

Yar Ali Khan scowled and muttered direly in his beard as he stalked out into the inner courtyard and headed for the stables. These lay within the high enclosure, and no one but the members of Gordon’s “family” knew that a hidden door connected them with an outer alley. So all the shadowy figures that lurked about his house that night were watching the other sides when the small party moved stealthily down the black alley. Within half an hour from the time Gordon rapped at his door, the clink of hoofs on the rocky road beyond the city wall marked the passing of three men who rode swiftly westward.

Meanwhile in the palace the Amir of Afghanistan was proving the adage concerning the uneasiness of the head that wears the crown.

He emerged from an inner chamber, wearing a pre­occupied expression and absently returned the salute of a tall, magnificently-shouldered Sikh who clicked his booted heels and came to military attention. The Amir turned up the corridor, indicating with a gesture that he wished to be alone, so Lal Singh saluted again and fell back, resuming his station by the door, one hand absently caressing the sharkskin-bound hilt of his long sabre.

His dark eyes followed the Amir up the corridor. He knew that his friend El Borak had been closeted with the king for several hours, and had left with an abruptness that hinted at anger.

This interview was likewise on the Amir’s mind as he entered a large lamp-lit chamber and crossed toward a gold-barred window that overlooked the sleeping city. It was the first rift in his relationship with the American, who acted as unofficial advisor, counsel, ambassador and secret service department. Hedged in by powerful nations which used his mountain kingdom as a pawn in their game of empire, the Amir leaned heavily on the western adventurer who had proved his reliability scores of times.

The Amir frowned, from his troubled spirit, glancing idly at a curtain which masked an alcove and absently reflecting that the wind must be rising, since the tapestry swayed lightly. He glanced at the gold-barred window and instantly went cold. The light curtains there hung motionless. Yet the hangings over the alcove had stirred—

The Amir was a powerful man, with plenty of personal courage. Almost instinctively he sprang, seized the tapestries and tore them apart—a dagger in a dark hand licked from between them and smote him full in the breast. He cried out as he went down, dragging his assailant with him. The man snarled like a wild beast, his dilated eyes glaring madly. His dagger ribboned the Amir’s khalat, revealing the mail shirt which had saved the ruler’s life more than once.

Outside a deep shout echoed the Amir’s lusty yell for help, and booted feet pounded down the corridor. The Amir had grasped his attacker by the throat and the knife-wrist, but the man’s stringy muscles were like knots of steel. As they rolled on the floor the dagger, glancing from the mail shirt, fleshed itself in arm, thigh and hand. Then, as the bravo heaved the weakening ruler under him, grasped his throat and lifted the knife again, something flashed in the lamp-light like a jet of blue lightning, and the murderer collapsed, split to the teeth.

“Your majesty—my lord—!” the Sikh was pale under his black beard. “Are you slain? Nay, you bleed! Wait!”

He thrust the corpse aside and lifted the Amir. The ruler was gasping for breath and covered with blood, his own and his attacker’s. He sank on a divan, and the Sikh began to rip strips of silk from the hangings to bind his wounds.

“Look!” the Amir gasped, pointing. His face was livid, his hand shook. “The knife! The knife!”

It lay glinting dully by the dead man’s hand—a curious weapon with three blades sprouting from the same hilt. Lal Singh started and swore beneath his breath.

“The Triple-Bladed Dagger!” panted the Amir, fear flooding his eyes. “The kind of knife that slew the Sultan of Turkey! The Shah of Persia! The Nizam of Hyderabad!”

“The mark of the Hidden ones!” muttered Lal Singh, uneasily eyeing the ominous symbol of the terrible cult which within the past year had struck again and again at the men occupying the high places of the East.

The noise had roused the palace; men were running down the corridors, shouting to know what had occurred.

“Shut the door!” exclaimed the Amir. “Admit no one but the major domo of the palace. ”

“But we must have a physician, your majesty,” protested the Sikh. “These wounds will not slay of themselves, but the dagger might have been poisoned. ”

“Then send someone for the hakim. Ya Allah! The Hidden Ones have marked me for doom!” The Amir was a brave man, but his experience had shaken him terribly. “Who can fight the dagger in the dark, the serpent underfoot, the poison in the wine-cup?

“Lal Singh, go swiftly to El Borak’s house and tell him I have desperate need of him! Bring him to me! If there is one man in Afghanistan who can protect me from these hidden devils, it is he!”

Lal Singh saluted and hurried from the chamber, shaking his head at the sight of fear in the countenance where fear had never before showed.

There was cause for the Amir’s fear. A strange and terrible cult had risen in the East. Who they were, what their ultimate purpose was, none knew. They were called the Hidden Ones and they slew with a three-bladed dagger. That was all that was known about them. Their agents appeared suddenly, struck and disappeared, or else were slain, refusing to be taken alive. Some considered them to be merely religious fanatics. Others believed their activities to possess a political significance. Lal Singh knew that not even Gordon had any definite information about them. But he was confident of the American’s ability to protect the Amir, even from these subtle fiends.

Three days after his hurried departure from Kabul, Gordon sat cross-legged in the trail where it looped over the rock ridge to follow the slope down to Khor village.

“I stand between you and death!” he warned the man who sat opposite him.

This man tugged his purple-stained beard reflectively. He was broad and powerful and his Bokhariot girdle bristled with dagger hilts. And he was Baber Khan, chief of the fierce Ghilzai, and absolute overlord of Khor and its three hundred wild swordsmen.

But there was no hint of arrogance in his answer.

“Allah favour thee! Yet what man can pass the spot of his death?”

“I offer you an opportunity to make your peace with the Amir. ”

Baber Khan shook his head with the fatalism of his race. “I have too many enemies at the royal court. If I went to Kabul the Amir would listen to their lies. He would set me on a stake, or hang me up in an iron cage for the kites to eat. Nay, I will not go!”

“Then take your people and find another abode. There are places in these Hills where not even the Amir could follow you. ”

Baber Khan glanced down the rocky slope to the cluster of mud-and-stone towers that rose above the encircling wall of the same substance. His thin nostrils expanded and into his eyes came a dark flame like that of an eagle which surveys its aerie.

“Nay, by Allah! My clan has held Khor since the days of Akbar. Let the Amir rule in Kabul. This is mine!”

“The Amir will likewise rule in Khor,” grunted Yar Ali Khan, squatting behind Gordon, with Ahmed Shah.

Baber Khan glanced in the other direction where the trail disappeared to the east between jutting crags. On these crags bits of white cloth were blown out on the sharp wind, which the watchers knew were the garments of the riflemen who guarded the pass day and night.

“Let him come,” said Baber Khan grimly. “We hold the valley. ”

“He’ll bring five thousand men, with artillery,” warned Gordon. “He’ll burn Khor and take your head back to Kabul. ”

“Inshallah,” agreed Baber Khan placidly, indomitably fatalistic.

As so often in the past Gordon fought down a rising anger at this invincible Oriental characteristic. Every instinct of his strenuous nature was a negation of this inert philosophy. But just now the matter seemed at a dead-lock, and he said nothing, but sat staring at the western crags where the sun hung, a ball of fire in the sharp windy blue.

Baber Khan, supposing that Gordon’s silence signified recognition of defeat, dismissed the matter with a casual wave, and said: “Sahib, there is something I desire to show you. Down in yonder ruined hut which stands outside the village wall, there lies a dead man, the like of which was never seen by me or any other man of Khor. Even in death he is strange and evil, and I think he is no natural man at all, but a—”

The sharp spang of a rifle-shot echoed among the crags to the east, and instantly all four men were on their feet, facing that way.

A shift in the wind brought the sound of angry shouting to them. Then a figure appeared on the cliffs, leaping agilely from ledge to ledge. He danced like a mountain devil, brandishing his rifle; his ragged cloak whipped out on the wind.

“Ohai, Baber Khan!” he yelled, straining above the gusts. “A Sikh on a foundered horse is beyond the pass! He demands speech with the lord El Borak!”

“A Sikh?” snapped Gordon, stiffening. “Let him in, at once!”

Baber Khan relayed the command in a bellow that vibrated among the cliffs, and the man swarmed back up the ledges. Presently a man appeared in the pass on a horse which seemed ready to drop at each step. Its head drooped and its coat was plastered with foam and sweat.

“Lal Singh!” ejaculated Gordon.

“By Krishna, sahib,” the Sikh grimaced as he slid stiffly to the ground. “Well are you named El Borak: the Swift! I do not think you were more than an hour ahead of me when I rode through the Kabul gate, but strive as I would, on a fresh horse seized at every village I passed, I could not overtake you,”

“Your news must be urgent, Lal Singh. ”

“It is, sahib,” the Sikh assured him, “The Amir sent me after you to beg you to return instantly to Kabul. Sahib, the Triple-Bladed Dagger has struck at the Amir!”

Gordon’s hard body tensed like that of a panther that scents peril. “Tell me about it!” he commanded, and in a few terse words Lal Singh told of the attack on the Amir.

“At your quarters I learned you had departed for Khor,” said Lal Singh. “I returned to the palace and Amir urged me to follow you and bring you back. He was sick of his wounds, and nearly dead with terror. ”

Gordon asked: “Did he say anything about the expedition he planned to lead against Khor?”

“Nay, sahib. But I think he will not leave the palace until you return. Certainly not until his wounds heal, if indeed he does not die of the poison with which the dagger blades were smeared. ”

“You have received a reprieve of Fate,” said Gordon to Baber Khan, and to Lal Singh he said: “Come down to the village, eat and sleep. We’ll start for Kabul at dawn. ”

As the five men started down the slope, with the weary horse plodding behind them, Baber Khan glanced at Gordon, and asked: “What is your thought, El Borak?”

“That somebody’s pulling strings in Constantinople, or in Moscow, or in Berlin,” answered the American.

“So? I deemed these Hidden Ones mere fanatics. ”

“More than that, I fear,” said Gordon. “Apparently it’s a secret society with anarchistic principles. But I’ve noticed that every ruler who’s been killed or attacked has been an ally or a friend of the British empire. So I believe some European power is behind them.

“But what were you going to show me?”

“A corpse in a broken hut!” Baber Khan turned aside and led them toward the hovel. “My warriors came upon him lying at the base of a cliff from which he had fallen or been thrown. I made them bring him here, but he died on the way, babbling in a strange tongue. My people feared it would bring a curse on the village. They deem him a magician or a devil, and with good cause.

“A long day’s journey southward, among mountains so wild and barren not even a Pathan could dwell among them, lies a country we call Ghulistan. ”

“Ghulistan!” Gordon echoed the sinister phrase. “In Turkish or Tatar that means Land of Roses, but in Arabic it means The Country of the Ghouls. ”

“Aye, the Land of Ghuls; an evil region of black crags and wild gorges, shunned by wise men. It seems uninhabited, yet men dwell there—men or demons. Sometimes a man is slain or a woman or child stolen from a lonely trail, and we know is their work. We have followed, have glimpsed shadowy figures moving through the night, but always the trail ends against a blank cliff through which only a demon could pass. Sometimes we have heard the voice of the djinn echoing among the crags. It is a sound to turn men’s hearts to ice. ”

They had reached the ruined hut, and Baber Khan pulled open the sagging door. A moment later the five men were bending over a figure which sprawled on the dirt floor.

It was a figure alien and incongruous; that of a short, squat man, with broad, square, flat features, coloured like dark copper, and narrow slant eyes—an unmistakable son of the Gobi. Blood clotted the thick black hair on the back of his head, and the unnatural position of his body told of broken bones.

“Has he not the look of a magician?” said Baber Khan uneasily.

“He’s a Mongol,” answered Gordon. “There are thousands like him in the land from which he came, far to the east, and they’re no magicians. But what he was doing here is more than I can say—”

Suddenly his black eyes blazed, and he snatched and tore the bloodstained khalat away from the squat throat. A stained woollen shirt came into view, and Yar Ali Khan, looking over Gordon’s shoulder, grunted explosively. On the shirt, worked in thread so crimson it might at first glance have been mistaken for a splash of blood, appeared a curious emblem: a human fist grasping a hilt from which jutted three double-edged blades.

“The Triple-Bladed Knife!” whispered Baber Khan, recoiling from that dread symbol which had come to embody a harbinger of death and destruction to the rulers of the East.

All looked at Gordon, but he said nothing. He stared down at the sinister emblem trying to capture a vague train of associations it roused—dim memories of an ancient and evil cult which used that same symbol, long ago.

“Can you have your men guide me to the spot where you found this man, Baber Khan?” he asked at last.

“Aye, sahib. But it is an evil place. It is in the Gorge of Ghosts, close to the borders of Ghulistan, and—”

“Good. Lal Singh, you and the others go and sleep. We ride at dawn. ”

“To Kabul, sahib?”

“No. To Ghulistan. ”

“Then you think—”

“I think nothing—yet; I go in search of knowledge. ”

Chapter Two

The Black Country

Dusk was mantling the jumbled sky-line when Gordon’s Ghilzai guide halted. Ahead of them the rugged terrain was broken by a deep canyon and beyond the canyon rose a forbidding array of black crags and frowning cliffs. The change from grey shale, brown slopes and reddish stone was abrupt, as if the canyon marked a distinct geographical division. Beyond the gorge there was nothing to be seen except a wild, hag-like chaos of broken black rock.

“There begins Ghulistan,” said the Ghilzai, and his hawk­eyed, hook-nosed comrades instinctively loosened their knives and clicked the bolts of their rifles. “Beyond that gorge, the Gorge of Ghosts, begins the country of horror and death. We go no further, sahib. ”

Gordon nodded, his keen gaze picking out a trail that looped down rugged slopes into the canyon. It was the fading trace of an ancient road they had been following for many miles, but it looked as if it had been used frequently, and lately.

The Ghilzai nodded, divining his thought.

“That trail is well-travelled. By it the demons of the black mountains come and go. But men who follow it will not return. ”

Yar Ali Khan tugged his beard truculently and jeered, though he secretly shared their superstitions. “Demons? What need demons with a trail?”

“When demons take the shape of men they might walk like men,” Ahmed Shah grunted in his bushy beard. Lal Singh the Sikh was imperturbable. His own mythology was full of myriad-limbed demons, but he had scant respect for the superstitions of other races.

“Demons fly with wings like a bat!” asserted Yar Ali Khan.

The Ghilzai decided to ignore the Afridi, and pointed to the jutting ledge over which the trail wound.

“At the foot of that slope we found the man you called a Mongol. Doubtless his brother demons quarreled with him and cast him down. ”

“Doubtless he tripped and fell and rolled off the trail,” grunted Gordon. “Mongols are desert men. They are unused to mountain climbing, and their legs are bowed and weakened by a life in the saddle. Such a one would stumble easily on a narrow trail. ”

“If he was a man, perhaps,” conceded the Ghilzai. “I will say—Allah!”

All started except Gordon, and the Ghilzais turned pale and threw up their rifles, glaring like startled wolves. Out over the crags, from the south, rolled a strange sound of peculiar resonance and stridency—a harsh, braying roar that vibrated among the mountains.

“The voice of the djinn!” ejaculated the Ghilzai, unconsciously jerking the rein of his horse so the brute squealed and reared. “Sahib, in the name of Allah the Compassionate, be wise! Return with us to Khor!”

“Go back to your village. That was the agreement. I am going on. ”

“Baber Khan will weep for thee!” the leader of the band yelled reproachfully over his shoulder as he kicked his pony into a wild run. “He loves thee like a brother! There will be woe in Khor! Aie! Ahai! Ohee!” His lamentations died away amidst the clatter of hoofs on stone as the Ghilzais, flogging their ponies hard, topped a ridge and vanished from view.

“Run, sons of noseless dams!” yelled Yar Ali Khan, who never missed an opportunity to vent tribal prejudice and flaunt personal superiority. “We will brand your devils and drag them to Khor by their tails!” But he fell mute the instant the victims were out of hearing.

Gordon and his companions sat their steeds alone on the canyon’s rim, staring in the direction from which had come that ominous voice.

Ahmed Shah shifted nervously in his saddle, and Yar Ali Khan tugged his patriarchal beard and eyed Gordon side­wise, like an apprehensive ghoul with a three-foot knife. But El Borak spoke to Lal Singh: “Have you ever heard a sound like that before?”

The tall Sikh nodded.

“Yes, sahib, in the mountains of the men who serve the devil. ”

Gordon lifted his reins without comment. He too had heard the roar of the ten-foot bronze trumpets that blare over the bare black mountains of forbidden Mongolia, in the hands of the shaven-headed priests of Erlik.

Yar Ali Khan snorted. He had not heard those trumpets, and he had not been consulted. He was as bellicosely jealous of Gordon’s attention as a favourite wolfhound. He thrust his horse in ahead of Lal Singh, so as to be next to Gordon as they rode down the steep slopes in the purple dusk. He bared his teeth at the Sikh who was too much accustomed to such displays of savage vanity to take offence, and said roughly to the man whose friendship he prized above everything else in the world: “Now that we have been lured into this country of devils by treacherous Ghilzai dogs who will undoubtedly steal back and cut the sahib’s throat while he sleeps, what have you planned for us?”

It might have been a gaunt old wolfhound growling at his master for patting another dog; Gordon bent his head and spat to hide a grin.

“We’ll camp in the canyon tonight. The horses are tired, and there’s no point in struggling through these gulches in the dark. Tomorrow we’ll do some exploring and scouting. There’s no doubt that the Mongol was one of the Hidden Ones. He must have been on foot when he fell. If he’d been on a horse, he wouldn’t have fallen unless the horse fell too. The Ghilzai didn’t find a dead horse. Only a dead man. If he was afoot, it’s certain that he wasn’t far from some camp or rendezvous. A Mongol wouldn’t walk far; wouldn’t walk a hundred feet unless he had to, in fact.

“The more I think of it the more it seems to me that the Hidden Ones have a rendezvous somewhere in that country across the gorge. It would make a perfect hide-out. The Hills in this particular corner of the globe aren’t thickly inhabited. Khor is the nearest village, and it’s a long day’s hard ride, as we’ve found. Wandering clans stay out of these parts, fearing the Ghilzais; and Baber Khan’s men are too superstitious to investigate much across that gorge. The Hidden Ones, hiding over there somewhere, could come and go pretty much undetected. That old road we’ve been following most of the day used to be a main caravan route, centuries ago, and it’s still practicable for men on horses. Better still, it doesn’t pass near any villages, and isn’t used by the tribes now. Men following it could get to within a day’s ride of Kabul without much fear of being seen by anyone. I remember seeing it on old maps, drawn on parchment, centuries ago.

“Frankly, I don’t know what we’ll do. Mainly we’ll keep our eyes open and await developments. Our actions will depend on circumstances. Our destiny,” said Gordon without cynicism, “is on Allah’s knees. ”

“La illaha illulah; Muhammad rassoul ullah!” agreed Yar Ali Khan sonorously, stroking his beard like a reverent cut-throat, completely mollified.

As they came down into the canyon they saw that the trail led across the rock-strewn floor and into the mouth of a deep, narrow gorge which debouched into the canyon from the south. The south wall of the canyon was higher than the north wall, and much more sheer; it swept up like a sullen rampart of solid black rock, broken at intervals by narrow cleft-like gorge-mouths. Gordon rode into the gorge in which the trail wound and followed it to the first bend, finding that bend was but the first of a succession of kinks. The ravine, running between sheer walls of rock, writhed and twisted like the track of a serpent and was already filled to the brim with darkness.

“This is our road, tomorrow,” said Gordon, and his men nodded silently, as he led them back to the main canyon, where some light still lingered, ghostly in the thickening dusk. The clang of their horses’ hoofs on the flint seemed startlingly loud in the sullen, brutish silence.

A few hundred feet west of the trail-ravine another, narrower one opened into the canyon. Its rock floor showed no sign of any trail, and it narrowed so rapidly that Gordon was inclined to believe it ended in a blind alley.

About half-way between these ravine mouths, but near the north wall, which was at that point precipitous, a tiny spring bubbled up in a natural basin of age-hollowed rock. Behind it, in a cave-like niche in the cliff, dry wiry grass grew sparsely, and there they tethered the weary horses. They camped at the spring, eating from tins, not risking a fire which might be seen from afar by hostile eyes—though they realized that there was a chance that they had been seen by hidden watchers already. There is always that chance in the Hills. The tents had been left in Khor. Blankets spread on the ground were luxuries enough for Gordon and his hardy followers.

His position seemed a strategic one. The party could not be attacked from the north, because of the sheer cliffs; no one could reach the horses without first passing through the camp. Gordon made provision against surprise from the south, or from east or west.

He divided his party into two watches. Lal Singh he placed on guard west of the camp, near the mouth of the narrower ravine, and Ahmed Shah had his station close to the mouth of the eastern ravine, up which, it was logical to suppose peril was most likely to come. Ahmed Shah had that post instead of Lal Singh (who could have bested him in any sort of a battle) because his external senses were a shade more acute than the Sikh’s; the senses of any savage being naturally keener than the specially-trained faculties of a civilized man, however intensely cultivated.

Any hostile band coming up or down the canyon, or entering it from either ravine would have to pass these sentries, whose vigilance Gordon had proven many times in the past. Later in the night he and Yar Ali Khan would take their places.

Darkness came swiftly in the canyon, seeming to flow in almost tangible waves down the black slopes, and ooze out of the blacker mouths of the ravines. Stars blinked out, cold, white and impersonal. Above the invaders brooded the great dusky bulks of the broken mountains, brutish, primordial. As Gordon fell asleep he was wondering what grim spectacles they had witnessed since the beginning of Time, and what inhuman creatures had crept through them before Man was.

Primitive instincts, slumbering in the average man, are whetted to razor-edge by a life of constant hazard. Gordon awoke the instant Yar Ali Khan touched him, and at once, before the Afridi spoke, the American knew that peril was in the air. The tense grasp on his shoulder spoke plainly to him of imminent danger.

He came up on one knee instantly, gun in hand. “What is it?”

Yar Ali Khan crouched beside him, gigantic shoulders bulking dimly in the gloom. The Afridi’s eyes glimmered like a cat’s in the dark. Back in the shadow of the cliffs the unseen horses moved restively, the only sound in the nighted canyon.

“Danger, sahib!” hissed the Afridi. “Close about us, creeping upon us in the dark! Ahmed Shah is slain!”

“What?”

“He lies near the mouth of the ravine with his throat cut from ear to ear. I dreamed that death was stealing upon us as we slept, and the fear of the dream awoke me. Without rousing you I stole to the mouth of the eastern ravine, and lo, there lay Ahmed Shah in his blood. He must have died silently and suddenly. I saw no one, heard no sound in the ravine, which was as black as the mouth of hell.

“Then I hurried along the south wall to the western ravine, and found no one! I speak truth, Allah be my witness. Ahmed is dead and Lal Singh is gone. The devils of the hills have slain one and snatched away the other, without waking us—we who sleep lightly as cats! No sound came from the ravine before which the Sikh had had his post. I saw nothing, heard nothing; but I sensed Death skulking there, with red eyes of awful hunger and fingers that dripped blood. Sahib, what men could have done away with such warriors as the Sikh and Ahmed Shah without a sound? This gorge is indeed the Gorge of Ghosts!”

Gordon made no reply, but crouched on his knee, straining eyes and ears into the darkness, while he considered the astounding thing that had occurred. It did not occur to him to doubt the Afridi’s statements. He could trust the man as he trusted his own eyes and ears. That Yar Ali Khan could have stolen away without awakening even him was not surprising, for the Afridi was of that breed of men who glide naked through the mists to steal rifles from the guarded tents of English soldiers. But that Ahmed Shah should have died and Lal Singh been spirited away without the sound of a struggle was incredible. It smacked of the diabolical.

“Who can fight devils, sahib? Let us mount the horses and ride—”

“ Listen!”

Somewhere a bare foot scruffed on the rock floor. Gordon rose, peering into the gloom. Men were moving out there in the darkness. Shadows detached themselves from the black background and slunk forward. Gordon drew the scimitar he had buckled on at Khor, thrusting his pistol back into its scabbard. Lal Singh was a captive out there, probably in line of fire. Yar Ali Khan crouched beside him, gripping his Khyber knife, silent now, and deadly as a wolf at bay, convinced that they were facing ghoulish fiends of the dark mountains, but ready to fight men or devils, if Gordon so willed it.

The dim-seen line moved in slowly, widening as it came, and Gordon and the Afridi fell back a few paces to have the rock wall at their back, and prevent themselves from being surrounded by those phantom-like figures.

The rush came suddenly, impetuously, bare feet slapping softly over the rocky floor, steel glinting dully in the dim starlight. Gordon could see like a cat in the dark, and Yar Ali Khan’s eyes were such as can be possessed only by a man bred in the abysmal blackness of the Hills. Even so they could make out few details of their assailants—only the bulks of them, and the shimmer of steel. They struck and parried by instinct and feel as much as by sight.

Gordon killed the first man to come within sword-reach, and Yar Ali Khan, galvanized by the realization that their foes were human after all, sounded a deep yell and exploded in a berserk burst of wolfish ferocity. Towering above the squat figures, his three-foot knife overreached the blades that hacked at him, and its edge bit deep. Standing side by side, with the wall at their backs, the two companions were safe from attack from the rear or flank. Steel rang sharply on steel and blue sparks flew, momentarily lighting wild bearded faces. There rose the ugly butcher-shop sound of keen blades cleaving flesh and bone, and men screamed or gasped death-gurgles from severed jugulars. For a few moments a huddled knot writhed and contorted near the rock wall. The work was too swift and desperate and blind to allow much consecutive thought or plan. But the advantage was with the men at bay. They could see as well as their attackers; man for man, they were stronger and more agile; and they knew when they struck their steel would flesh itself only in enemies. The others were handicapped by their numbers and the darkness, and the knowledge that they might kill a companion with a blind stroke must surely have tempered their frenzy.

Gordon, ducking a sword before he realized he had seen it swinging at him, found time for an instant of surprise. Thrice his blade had grated against something yielding but impenetrable. These men were wearing shirts of mail! He slashed where he knew unprotected thighs and heads and necks would be, and men spurted their blood on him as they died.

Then the rush ebbed as suddenly as it had flooded. The attackers gave way and melted like phantoms into the darkness. That darkness had become not quite so absolute. The eastern rims of the canyon were lined with a silvery fire that marked the rising of the moon.

Yar Ali Khan gave tongue like a wolf and charged after the dim, retreating figures, foam of aroused blood-lust flecking his beard. He stumbled over a corpse, stabbed savagely downward before he realized it was a dead man, and then Gordon grabbed his arm and jerked him to a halt. He almost dragged the powerful American off his feet, as he plunged like a lassoed bull, breathing gustily.

“Wait, you idiot! Do you want to run into a trap? Let them go!”

Yar Ali Khan subsided to a wolfish wariness that was no less deadly than his berserk fury, and together they glided cautiously after the vague figures which disappeared in the mouth of the eastern ravine. There the pursuers halted, peering warily into the black depths. Somewhere, far down it, a dislodged pebble rattled on the stone, and both men tensed involuntarily, reacting like suspicious panthers.

“The dogs did not halt,” muttered Yar Ali Khan. “They flee still. Shall we follow them?”

He did not speak with conviction, and Gordon merely shook his head. Not even they dared plunge into that well of blackness, where ambushes might make every step a march of death. They fell back to the camp and the fear-maddened horses, which were frantic with the stench of fresh-spilt blood.

“When the moon rises high enough to flood the canyon with light,” quoth Yar Ali Khan, “they will shoot us from the ravine. ”

“That’s a chance we must take,” grunted Gordon. “Maybe they’re not good shots. ”

With the tiny beam of his pocket flashlight Gordon investigated the four dead men left behind by the attackers. The thin pencil of light moved from face to bearded face, and Yar Ali Khan, looking over his shoulder, grunted and swore: “Devil worshippers, by the beard of Allah! Yezidees! Sons of Melek Taus!”

“No wonder they stole through the dark like cats of hell,” muttered Gordon, who well knew the uncanny stealth possessed by the people of that ancient and abominable cult which worship the Brazen Peacock on Mount Lalesh the Accursed.

Yar Ali Khan made a sign calculated to fend off devils which might be expected to be lurking near any place where their votaries had died.

“Come away, sahib. It is not fitting that you should touch this carrion. No wonder they slew and stole like the djinn of silence. They are children of night and darkness, and they partake of the attributes of the elements which gave them birth. ”

“But what are they doing here?” mused Gordon. “Their homeland is in Syria—about Mount Lalesh. It’s the last stronghold of their race, to which they were driven by Christian and Moslem alike. A Mongol from the Gobi, and devil-worshippers from Syria. What’s the connection?”

He grasped the coarse woolen khalat of the nearest corpse, and swore down Yar Ali Khan’s instant objections.

“That flesh is accursed,” sulked the Afridi, looking like a scandalized ghoul, with the dripping knife in his hand, and blood trickling down his beard from a broken tooth. “It is not fit for a sahib such as thou to handle. If it must be done, let me—”

“Oh, shut up! Ha! Just as I thought!”

The tiny beam rested on the linen jerkin which covered the thick chest of the mountaineer. There gleamed, like a splash of fresh blood, the emblem of a hand gripping a three-bladed dagger.

“Wallah!” Discarding his scruples, Yar Ali Khan ripped the khalats from the other three corpses. Each displayed the fist and dagger.

“Are Mongols Mohammedans, sahib?” he asked presently.

“Some are. But that man in Baber Khan’s hut wasn’t. His canine teeth were filed to sharp points. He was a devotee of Erlik, the Yellow God of Death. Probably a priest. Cannibalism is an element of some of their rituals. ”

“The man who killed the Sultan of Turkey was a Kurd,” mused Yar Ali Khan. “Some of them worship Melek Taus, too, secretly. But it was an Arab who slew the Shah of Persia and a Delhi Moslem fired at the Viceroy. What would true Mohammedans be doing in a society which includes Mongol and Yezidee devil-worshippers?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” answered Gordon snapping off the electric torch.

They squatted in the shadow of the cliffs, in silence, as the moonlight, weird and ghostly, grew in the canyon, and rock and ledge and wall took shape. No sound disturbed the brooding quiet.

Yar Ali Khan rose at last and stood up etched in the witch-light glow, a fair target for anyone lurking in the ravine-mouth. But no shot rang out.

“What now?”

Gordon pointed to dark splotches on the bare rock floor that the moonlight made visible and distinct.

“They’ve left us a trail a child could follow. ”

Without a word Yar Ali Khan sheathed his knife and secured his rifle from among the pack-rolls near the blankets. Gordon likewise armed himself and also fastened to his belt a coil of thin, strong rope with a short iron hook at one end of it. He had found such a rope invaluable time and again in mountain travel. The moon had risen higher, fully lighting the canyon, drawing a thin thread of silver along the middle of the ravine. That was enough light for men like Gordon and Yar Ali Khan.

Through the moonlight they approached the ravine-mouth, rifles in hand, clearly limned for any marksmen who, after all, might be skulking there, but ready to take the chances of luck, or fate, or fortune or whatever it is that decides the destiny of men on blind trails. No shot cracked, no furtive figures flitted among the shadows. The blood drops sprinkled the rocky floor thickly. Obviously the Yezidees had carried away some grim wounds.

Gordon thought of Ahmed Shah, lying dead back there in the canyon, without a cairn to cover his body. But time could not be spared now for the dead. The Yusufzai was past hurting; but Lal Singh was a prisoner in the hands of men to whom mercy was unknown. Later Ahmed Shah’s body could be taken care of; just now the task at hand was to track down the Yezidees and get the Sikh away from them before they killed him—if, indeed, they had not done that already.

They pushed up the ravine without hesitation, rifles cocked. They went afoot, for they believed their enemies were on foot, unless horses were hidden somewhere up the ravine; the gulch was so narrow and rugged that a horseman would be at a fatal disadvantage in any kind of a fight.

At each bend of the ravine they expected and were prepared for an ambush, but the trail of blood-drops led on, and no figures barred their way. The blood drops were not so thick now, but they were still sufficient to mark the way. Gordon quickened his pace, hopeful of overtaking the Yezidees, whom now seemed undoubtedly in flight. They had a long start, but if, as he believed, they were carrying one or more wounded men, and were likewise burdened with a prisoner who would not make things any more convenient for them than he could help, that lead might be rapidly cut down. He believed that the Sikh was alive, since they had not found his body, and if the Yezidees had killed him, they would have had no reason for hiding the corpse.

The ravine pitched steeply upward, narrowing, then widened as it descended and abruptly made a crook and came out into another canyon running roughly east and west and only a few hundred feet wide. The blood-spattered trail ran straight across to the sheer south wall—and ceased.

Yar Ali Khan grunted. “The Ghilzai dogs spoke truth. The trail stops at a cliff that only a bird could fly over. ”

Gordon halted at the foot of the cliff, puzzled. They had lost the trace of the ancient road in the Gorge of Ghosts, but this was the way the Yezidees had come, without a doubt. Blood spattered a trail to the foot of the cliffs—then ceased as if those who bled had simply dissolved into thin air.

He ran his eyes up the sheer pitch of the wall which rose straight up for hundreds of feet. Directly above him, at a height of some fifteen feet, a narrow ledge jutted, a mere outcropping some ten or fifteen feet in length and only a few feet wide. It seemed to offer no solution to the mystery. But halfway up to the ledge he saw a dull reddish smear on the rock of the wall.

Following this lead blindly, Gordon uncoiled his rope, whirled the weighted end about his head and sent it curving upward. The hook bit into the rim of the ledge and held, and Gordon went up it, climbing the thin, smooth strand as swiftly and easily as most men would manipulate a rope ladder. He had not sailed the Seven Seas without profiting by the experience of climbing ropes, in all sorts of weather.

As he passed the smear on the stone he confirmed his belief that it was blood. A wounded man being hauled up to the ledge, or climbing as he was climbing, might have left such a smear.

Yar Ali Khan, below him, fidgeted with his rifle, trying to get a better view of the ledge, and alternately criticising his companion’s action, and adjuring him to caution. His pessimistic imagination peopled the ledge with assassins lying prone and unseen; but the shelf lay bare when Gordon pulled himself over the edge.

The first thing he saw was a heavy iron ring set deep in the stone above the ledge, out of sight of anyone below. The metal was worn bright as if by the friction of much usage. More blood was smeared thickly at the place where a man would come up over the rim, if he climbed a rope fastened to the ring, or was hoisted.

And yet more blood drops spattered the ledge, leading diagonally across it toward the sheer wall, which showed considerable weathering at that point. And Gordon saw something else—the blurred but unmistakable print of bloody fingers on the rock of the wall. He stood motionless for a few moments, heedless of Yar Ali Khan’s importunities, while he studied the cracks in the rock. Presently he laid his hand on the wall over the bloody finger-prints, and shoved. Instantly, smoothly, a section of the wall swung inward, and he was staring into a narrow tunnel, dimly lit by the moon somewhere behind it.

Wary as a stalking panther he stepped into it, and immediately heard a startled yelp from Yar Ali Khan, to whose inadequate view it had seemed that he had simply melted into the solid rock. Gordon emerged head and shoulders to objurgate his astounded follower to silence, and then continued his investigations.

The tunnel was short, and moonlight poured into it from the other end where it opened into a cleft. The moonlight slanted down from above into this cleft, which ran straight for a hundred feet and then made an abrupt bend, blocking further view. It was like a knife-cut through a block of solid rock.

The door through which he had entered was an irregular-shaped slab of rock, hung on heavy, well-oiled iron hinges. It fitted perfectly into its aperture, and its irregular shape made the cracks appear to be merely seams in the cliffs, produced by time and erosion.

A rope ladder made of heavy rawhide was coiled on a small rock shelf just inside the tunnel mouth, and with this Gordon returned to the ledge outside. He drew up his rope and coiled it, then made fast the ladder and let it down, and Yar Ali Khan swarmed up it in a frenzy of impatience to be at his friend’s side again.

He swore softly as he comprehended the mystery of the vanishing trail.

“But why was not the door bolted on the inside, sahib?”

“Probably men are coming and going constantly. Men outside might have desperate need of passing through this door, without having to shout for someone to come and let them in. There wasn’t a chance in a thousand of its ever being discovered. I wouldn’t have discovered it if it hadn’t been for the blood-marks; at that I was just playing a hunch when I pushed on the rock. ”

Yar Ali Khan was for plunging instantly into the cleft, but Gordon had become wary. He had not seen or heard anything that would indicate the presence of a sentry, but he did not believe that a people who showed so much craft in concealing the entrance to their country would leave it unguarded, however slight might be the chances of its discovery.

He hauled up the raw-hide ladder, coiled it back on the shelf and closed the door, cutting off the circulation of the moonlight and plunging that end of the tunnel into darkness in which he commanded Yar Ali Khan to await his report. The Afridi cursed under his breath, but Gordon believed that one man could reconnoitre beyond that cryptic bend better than two, and as usual he had his way. Yar Ali Khan squatted in the darkness by the door, hugging his rifle and muttering anathema, while Gordon strode down the tunnel and into the cleft.

This was simply a narrow split in the great solid mass of the cliffs, and an irregular knife-edge of star-lit sky was visible, hundreds of feet overhead. Enough moonlight found its way into the crevice to make it light enough for Gordon’s catlike eyes.

He had not reached the bend when a scruffing of feet beyond it warned him. He had scarcely concealed himself behind a broken outcropping of rock that was split away from the side-wall, when the sentry came. He came leisurely, and in the manner of one who performs a routine task perfunctorily, secure in his conviction of the inaccessibility of his retreat. He was a squat Mongol with a square, copperish face, wicked slanted eyes, and a wide gash-like mouth. Altogether, his appearance was not unlike those devils which abound in Hill-country legends as he strode along with the wide roll of a horseman, trailing a high-powered rifle.

He was passing Gordon’s hiding-place when some obscure instinct brought him about like a flash, teeth bared in a startled snarl, rifle jumping for a shot from the hip. But even as he turned, Gordon was on his feet with the instant uncoiling of steel spring muscles, and as the rifle muzzle leaped to a level, the scimitar lashed down. The Mongol dropped like an ox, his round skull split to the teeth.

Gordon crouched motionless, glaring along the corridor. As no sound gave indications that anyone else was within hearing, he risked a low whistle which brought Yar Ali Khan headlong into the cleft, teeth bared and eyes blazing in expectancy of a fight.

He grunted expressively at the sight of the dead man.

“Yes—another Erlik-worshipper. The devil who sired them only knows how many more are hidden along this defile. We’ll drag him behind these rocks where I hid. It’s usually a good plan to hide the body, when you’ve made a kill. Come on! If there were any more around that bend, they’d have heard the blow I struck.”

Gordon was correct. Beyond the bend the long, deep defile ran empty to the next kink. Gordon believed that the man he had killed was the only sentry posted in the cleft, and they strode on without hesitation. The moonlight in the narrow gash above them was paling when they emerged into the open at last. Here the defile broke into a chaos of broken rock, and the single gorge became half a dozen, threading between gaunt isolated crags and split-off rocks like the separate mouths of a river that splits into streams at the delta. Crumbling pinnacles and turrets of black stone stood up like gaunt ghosts in the grey light which betrayed the coming of dawn.

Threading their way between these grim sentinels, they presently looked out upon a level, rock-strewn floor that stretched for three hundred yards to the foot of an abrupt cliff. The trail they had been following, grooved by many feet in the weathered stone, crossed the level and looped up the cliff, tier by tier, on ramps cut in the rock. But what lay on top of the cliffs they could not guess. To right and left the solid wall veered away, flanked by the broken pinnacles.

“What now, sahib?” In the grey light the Afridi looked like a mountain goblin surprised out of his crag-cave by dawn.

“I think we must be close to our destination. Listen!”

Over the cliffs rolled the blare they had heard the night before, but now much nearer—the strident, awesome, sullen roar of the giant trumpet.

“Have we been seen?” wondered Yar Ali Khan, working the bolt of his rifle.

“That is on the lap of Allah. But we must see, and we can not climb that road up the cliff without first knowing what lies above it. Here! This will serve our purpose.”

It was a weathered crag which rose like a tower among its lesser fellows. Any Hill-bred child could have scaled it. Yar Ali Khan and Gordon went up it almost as swiftly as if it had been a stairway, being careful to keep its bulk between them and the opposite cliffs, until they reached the summit, which was higher than the cliffs, and lay behind a spur of rock, staring through the rosy haze of the rising dawn.

“Allah!” swore Yar Ali Khan, involuntarily reaching for the rifle slung on his back.

Seen from their vantage point the opposite cliffs assumed their real nature as one side of a gigantic mesa-like block which reminded Gordon of the formations of his native Southwest. It rose sheer from the surrounding level, four to five hundred feet in height, and its perpendicular sides seemed unscalable except for the point where the trail had been laboriously cut into the stone. East, north and west it was girdled by crumbling crags, separated from the plateau by the level canyon floor which varied in width from three hundred yards to half a mile. On the south the plateau abutted on a gigantic, bare mountain whose gaunt peaks dominated the surrounding pinnacles.

But the watchers devoted only a glance to the geographical formation, mechanically analyzing and appreciating it. It was an incredible phenomenon of another nature which gripped their whole attention.

Gordon had not been sure just what he expected to find at the end of the bloody trail. He had anticipated a rendezvous of some kind, certainly: a cluster of horse-hide tents, a cavern, perhaps even a village of mud and stone nestling on a hill-side. But they were looking at a city whose domes and towers glistened in the rosy dawn, like a magic city of sorcerers stolen from some fabled land and set down in this desert spot!

“The city of the djinn!” ejaculated Yar Ali Khan, jolted back into his original belief concerning the nature of their enemies. “Allah is my protection against the evil of Shaitan the Damned!” He snapped his fingers in a gesture older than Mohammed.

The plateau was roughly oval in shape, about a mile and a half in length from north to south, somewhat less than a mile in width from east to west. The city stood near the southern extremity, etched against the dark mountain behind it, its flat-topped stone houses and clustering trees dominated by a large edifice whose purple dome gleamed in the sharp dawn, shot with gold.

“Enchantment and necromancy!” exclaimed Yar Ali Khan, completely upset.

Gordon did not reply, but the Celtic blood in his veins responded to the sombre aspect of the scene. The harsh gauntness of the gloomy black crags was not softened by the contrast of the city; that instead partook of their sullen menace, in spite of its masses of green and sheen of colour. The glitter of its purple, gold-traced dome was sinister. The black crags, crumbling with unholy antiquity, were a fit setting for it. It was like a city of demoniac mystery, rising amidst ruin and decay, and gleaming only with sinful life.

“This must be the stronghold of the Hidden Ones,” muttered Gordon. “I’d expected eventually to find their headquarters concealed in the native quarter of some city like Delhi, or Bombay. But this is a logical point. From here they can strike at all the countries of Western Asia and have a safe hide-out to retire to. But who would have expected to find a city like that here, in a country so long supposed to be practically uninhabited?”

“Not even we can fight a whole city, whether devils or men,” grunted Yar Ali Khan.

Gordon fell silent while he studied the distant view. Carefully analysed, the city did not show to be so large as it had appeared to be at first glance. It was compactly planned, but unwalled. The houses, two or three stories in height, stood among clusters of trees and surprising gardens—surprising because the plateau seemed almost solid rock, as far as the watchers could see. Gordon reached a decision.

“Ali, hasten back to our camp in the Gorge of Ghosts. Take the horses and ride for Khor. Tell Baber Khan all that has occurred, and say to him that I need him and all his swords. Bring the Ghilzai through the cleft and halt them among these defiles until you get a signal from me, or know that I’m dead. Here’s a chance to sever two necks with the same stroke. If Baber Khan helps us wipe out this nest of vipers, the Amir will pardon him.”

“ Shaitandevour Baber Khan! What of thee?”

“I’m going into that city.”

“ Wallah!” swore the Afridi.

“I’ve got to. The Yezidees have gone there, and Lal Singh must be with them. They may kill him before the Ghilzai could get here. I’ve got to get him away before we can lay any plans about attacking the city. If you start now, you can get to Khor shortly after nightfall. If you start back from Khor immediately, you should arrive at this spot shortly after sun-up. If I’m alive and at liberty, I’ll meet you here. If I don’t, let you and Baber Khan use your own judgment. But the important thing just now is to get the Ghilzais here.”

Yar Ali Khan immediately found objections.

“Baber Khan has no love for me. If I go to him alone he will spit in my beard and I will kill him and then his dogs will kill me!”

“He’ll do no such thing, and you know it.”

“He will not come!”

“He’d come through Hell if I sent for him.”

“His men will not follow him; they fear devils.”

“They’ll come fast enough when you tell them it is men who haunt Ghulistan.”

“But the horses will be gone. The devils will have stolen them.”

“I doubt it. No one has left the city since we took the trail, and no one has come in behind us. Anyway, you can make it to Khor on foot, if necessary. It will just take longer.”

Then Yar Ali Khan tore his beard in wrath and voiced his real objection to leaving Gordon.

“Those sons of dogs in that city will flay you alive!”

“Nay, I will match guile with guile. I will be a fugitive from the wrath of the Amir, an outlaw seeking sanctuary. The East is full of lies concerning me. They will aid me now.”

Yar Ali Khan abandoned the argument suddenly, realizing the uselessness of it. Grumbling in his beard, wagging his turbaned head direfully, the Afridi clambered down the crag and vanished in the defile without a backward look.

When he was out of sight, Gordon likewise descended and went toward the cliffs.

Chapter Three

The People of Ismail

Gordon expected, at each step, to be fired at from the cliffs, although he had seen no sentinels among the rocks at their crest, when he looked from the crag. But he crossed the canyon, reached the foot of the cliff and began mounting the steep road—still flecked here and there with red drops—without having sighted any human being. The trail wound interminably up a succession of ramps, with low, heavy walls on the outer edge. He had time to admire the engineering ability which made that road possible. Obviously it was no work of Afghan hillmen, and just as obviously its construction had not been recent. It looked ancient, strong as the mountain itself.

For the last thirty feet the ramps gave way to a flight of steep steps cut into the rock, making a deepening slot as they approached the crest. Still no one challenged him, and he came out on the plateau among a cluster of boulders, from behind which seven men who had been squatting over a game, sprang to their feet and glared wildly at him as if he had been an apparition. They were Kurds to a man, lean, hard-bodied warriors with hawk-beak noses, their slim waists girdled by cartridge-belts, and with rifles in their hands.

Those rifles were instantly levelled at him. Gordon made no move, nor did he display either perturbation or surprise. He set his rifle-butt on the ground and eyed the startled Kurds tranquilly.

These cut-throats were undecided as cornered wildcats, and therefore equally dangerous and unpredictable. His life hung on the crook of a nervous trigger-finger. But for the moment they merely glared, struck dumb by his unexpected materialization.

“El Borak!” muttered the taller of the Kurds, his eyes blazing with fear and suspicion and the instinct to kill. “What do you here?”

Gordon ran his eyes leisurely over them all before he replied, an easy, relaxed figure standing carelessly before chose seven tense shapes.

“I seek your master,” he replied presently.

This did not seem to reassure them. They began to mutter among themselves, never relaxing the vigilance of eye or trigger finger.

The taller Kurd’s voice rose irascibly, dominating the others: “You chatter like crows! This thing is plain: we were gambling and did not see him come. Our duty is to watch the Stair and see that no one mounts it without permission. We have failed in our duty. If it is known there will be punishment. Let us slay him and throw him over the cliff.”

“Aye,” agreed Gordon equably. “Do so. And when your master asks: ‘Where is El Borak, who brought me important news?’ say to him: ‘Lo, thou didst not consult with us concerning this man, and so we slew him to teach thee a lesson!’&#nbsp;“

They winced at the biting irony of his words and tone, and shot uneasy glances at one another.

“None will ever know,” growled one. “Shoot him.”

“Nay, the shot would be heard and there would be questions to answer.”

“Cut his throat!” suggested the youngest of the band, and was scowled at so murderously by his fellows that he fell back in confusion.

“Aye, cut my throat,” advised Gordon, laughing at them. “Oneof you might survive to tell the tale.”

This was no mere bombast, as most of them knew, and they betrayed their uneasiness in their black scowls. They yearned to slay him, but they dared not use their rifles; and at least the older warriors knew the ghastly price they would pay for attacking him with edged weapons. He would have no compunction about using either the rifle in his hand, or the pistol they knew he carried concealed somewhere.

“Knives are silent,” muttered the youngster, trying to justify himself.

He was rewarded by receiving a rifle butt driven angrily into his belly, which made him salaam involuntarily, and then lift his voice in gasping lamentation.

“Be silent, son of a dog! Would you have us fight El Borak’s guns with naked steel?”

Having worked off some of their dissatisfaction on their unfortunate comrade, the Kurds grew calmer, and one of the others inquired of Gordon, uncertainly: “You are expected?”

“Would I come here if I were not expected? Does the lamb thrust his head unbidden into the jaws of the wolf?”

“Lamb?” The Kurds cackled sardonically. “Thou a lamb? Ha, Allah! Say, rather, does the grey wolf with blood on his fangs seek the hunter!”

“If there is blood on my fangs it is but the blood of fools who disobeyed their master’s commands,” retorted Gordon. “Last night, in the Gorge of Ghosts—”

“Ya Allah! Was it thee the Yezidee fools fought? They knew thee not! They said they had slain an Englishman and his servants in the Gorge.”

So that was why the sentries were so careless; for some reason the Yezidees had lied about the outcome of that battle, and the watchers of the Road were not expecting any pursuit.

“None of you was among those who in their ignorance fell upon me in the Gorge?”

“Do we limp? Do we bleed? Do we weep from weariness and wounds? Nay, we have not fought El Borak!”

“Then be wise and do not make the mistake they made, for which mistake some are dead and the skin shall be taken in strips from the backs of the living. And now, will you take me to him who awaits me, or will you cast dung in his beard by scorning his orders?“

“Allah forbid!” ejaculated the tall Kurd. “No order had been given us. Nay, El Borak, thy heart is full of guile as a serpent’s, and where thou walkest, there swords are crimsoned and men die. But if this be a lie then our master shall see thy death. And if it be not a lie, then we can have no blame. Give up thy rifle and scimitar, and we will conduct thee to him.”

Gordon surrendered the weapons, secure in the knowledge of the big pistol reposing in its shoulder scabbard under his left arm.

The leader then picked up the rifle dropped by the young Kurd, who was still bent double and groaning heartily: straightened him with a resounding kick in the rear; shoved the rifle in his hands and bade him watch the Stair as if his life depended on it; gave him another kick, and a cuff on the ear by way of emphasis, and turned, barked orders to the others.

As they closed in around the apparently unarmed American, Gordon knew their hands itched for a knife-thrust in his back; but he had sown the seeds of fear and uncertainty in their primitive minds, and he knew they dared not strike. They moved out of the clustering boulders and started along the wide, well-marked road that led to the city. That road had once been paved, and in some places the paving was still in fair condition.

“The Yezidees passed into the city just before dawn?” he asked casually, making a swift estimation of the time element.

“Aye,” was the brief reply.

“They could not march fast,” mused Gordon, almost as if to himself. “They had wounded men to carry. And then the Sikh they had prisoner would be stubborn. They would have to beat and prod and drag him.”

One of the men turned his head and began: “Why, the Sikh—”

The leader basked him to silence, and turned on Gordon a gaze baleful with suspicion.

“Let not another man speak. Do not answer his questions. Ask him none. If he mocks us, retort not. He is a serpent for craft. If we talk to him he will have us bewitched before we reach Shalizahr.”

So that was the name of that fantastic city; Gordon seemed to remember the name in some medieval historical connection.

“Why do you mistrust me?” he demanded. “Have I not come to you with open hands?”

“Aye! Once I saw you come to the Turks of Bitlis with open hands; but when you closed those hands the streets of Bitlis ran red and the heads of the lords of Bitlis swung from the saddles of your raiders. Nay, El Borak, I know you of old, from the days when you led your outlaws through the hills of Kurdistan. I fought with you against the Turks, and later, because of a change in politics, I fought with the Turks against you. I cannot match my hand against your hand, nor my brain against your brain, nor my tongue against your tongue. But I can keep my tongue between my teeth, and I shall. You need not seek to trap me with cunning words, for I will not speak. I am taking you to the master of Shalizahr. All your dealing shall be with him. That is none of my affair. I am as mute and without thought in the matter as the horse who bears king or outlaw alike. My responsibility is only to bring you before my master. In the meantime you shall not trap me into a snare. I will not speak, and if any of my men answer you, I will break his head with my rifle butt.”

“I thought I recognized you,” said Gordon. “You areYusuf ibn Suleiman. You were a good fighter.”

The Kurd’s lean, scarred visage lighted at the remark, and he started to speak—then recollected himself, scowled ferociously, swore at one of his men who had not offended in any way, squared his shoulders uncompromisingly, and strode stiffly ahead of the party.

Gordon did not stride; rather he strolled, and his tranquil attitude had its effect on his captors. He had the air of a man walking amidst an escort of honour, rather than a guard, and his bearing reacted upon them, so by the time they reached the city they were shouldering their rifles instead of carrying them at the ready, and allowing a respectful interval between themselves and him.

Details of Shalizahr stood out as they approached. Gordon saw the secrets of the groves and gardens. Soil, doubtless brought laboriously from distant valleys, had been superimposed upon the bare rock in some of the many depressions which pitted the surface of the plateau, and an elaborate system of irrigation canals, deep, narrow channels which presented the minimum surface for evaporation, threaded the gardens, apparently originating in some inexhaustible water supply near the centre of the city. The plateau, sheltered by the crumbling peaks which rose on all sides, presented a more moderate climate than was common in those mountains, and the hardy vegetation grew in abundance.

The gardens lay mostly on the east and west sides of the city. The road, as it entered the city, ran between a large orchard on the left, and a smaller garden on the right. Both were enclosed by low stone walls, and Gordon could not foresee the bloody part that orchard was to play in this strange adventure into which he was going. A wide open space separated the orchard from the nearest house, but on the other side of the road a flat-topped three-storey stone house adjoined the garden on the south. A few yards on the city proper began—lines of flat-roofed stone houses fronting each other across the wide, paved street, each with an expanse of garden behind it.

There was no wall about the city, and the walls about the gardens and the houses were low, obviously not intended for defence. The plateau itself was a fortress. The mountain which frowned above and behind the city stood at a greater distance than it had seemed when first he saw it. From the crag it had appeared that the city backed up against the mountain slope. Now he saw that nearly half a mile of ravine-gashed plain separated the city from the mountain. The plateau was, however, connected with the mountain; it was like a great shelf jutting out from the massive slope.

Men at work in the gardens and loitering along the street halted and stared at the Kurds and their captive. He saw more Kurds, many Persians, and Yezidees; he saw Arabs, Mongols, Druses, Turks, Indians, even a few Egyptians. But no Afghans. Evidently the heterogeneous population of that strange city had no affiliations with the native inhabitants of the land.

The people did not carry their curiosity beyond questioning stares. The street widened into a suk closed on the south side by a broad wall which enclosed the palacial building with its gorgeous dome.

There was no guard at the massive bronze-barred, gold-worked gates, only a gay-clad negro who salaamed deeply as he swung the portals open. Gordon and his escort came into a broad courtyard paved with coloured tile, in the midst of which a fountain bubbled and pigeons fluttered about it. East and west the court was bounded by inner walls over which peeped foliage that told of more gardens, and Gordon noticed a slim tower that rose almost as high as the dome itself, its lacy tilework gleaming in the sunlight.

The Kurds marched straight on across the court and were halted on the broad pillared portico of the palace by a guard of thirty Arabs in resplendent regalia—plumed helmets of silvered steel, gilded corselets, rhinoceros-hide shields, and gold-chased scimitars, which archaic accoutrements contrasted curiously with the modern rifles in their hands, and the cartridge-belts which girdled their lean waists.

The hawk-faced captain of the guard conversed briefly withYusuf ibn Suleiman, and Gordon divined that no love was lost between these members of rival races, whatever circumstances had brought them into alliance.

The captain, whom men addressed as Muhammad ibn Ahmed, presently made a gesture with his slim brown hand, and Gordon was surrounded by a dozen glittering Arabs, and marched among them up the broad marble steps and through the wide arch whose bronze scroll-worked doors stood wide. The Kurds followed, without their rifles, and not looking at all happy.

They passed through wide, dim-lit halls, from the vaulted and fretted ceilings of which hung smoking bronze censers, while on either hand velvet-curtained arches hinted at inner mysteries. Tapestries rustled, soft footfalls whispered, and once Gordon saw a slim white hand grasping a hanging as if the owner peered from behind it. Accustomed as he was to the furtiveness and subdued undertones of Eastern palaces, Gordon sensed here a more than ordinary atmosphere of mystery and secrecy.

Even the swagger of the Arabs—all except their captain—was modified. The Kurds were openly uneasy. Mystery and intangible menace lurked in those dim, gorgeous halls. He might have been traversing a palace of Nineveh or ancient Persia, but for the modern weapons of his escort.

Presently they emerged into a broader hallway and approached a double-valved bronze door, flanked by more gorgeously-clad guardsmen, Persians, these, scented and painted like the warriors of Cambyses, and holding antique­looking spears instead of rifles.

These bizarre figures stood as impassively as statues while the Arabs swaggered by with their captive—or guest—and entered a semi-circular room where dragon-worked tapestries covered the walls, hiding all possible doors or windows except the one by which they had entered. The ceiling was lofty and arched, worked in fretted gold and ebony, hung with golden lamps. Opposite from the great doorway there stood a marble dais. On the dais there stood a great canopied chair, scrolled and carved like a throne, and on the velvet cushions which littered the seat lolled a slender figure in a pearl-sewn silk khalat, and cloth-of-gold slippers with turned-up toes. On the rose-coloured turban glistened a great gold brooch, set with diamonds, made in the shape of a human hand gripping a three-bladed dagger. The face beneath the turban was oval, the colour of old ivory, with a small black pointed beard. The eyes were wide, dark and contemplative. The man was a Persian.

On either side of the throne stood a giant Sudanese, like images of heathen gods carved out of black basalt, naked but for sandals and silken loin-cloths, with broad-bladed tulwars in their hands.

“Who is this?” languidly inquired the man on the throne, speaking Arabic, and gesturing for his henchmen to cease their energetic salaaming.

“El Borak!” answered Muhammad ibn Ahmed, with a definite swagger, in his consciousness that the announcement of that name would create something of a sensation—as it would anywhere East of Stamboul.

The dark eyes quickened with interest, sharpened with suspicion, and Yusuf ibn Suleiman, watching his master’s face with painful intensity, drew in a quick breath and clenched his hands so the nails bit into the palms.

“How comes he in Shalizahr unannounced?”

“The Kurdish dogs who are supposed to watch the Stair said he came to them, swearing that he had been sent for by the Shaykh Al Jebal!”

Gordon stiffened as he heard that title. It clinched all his suspicions. It was fantastic, incredible; yet it was true. His black eyes fixed with fierce intensity on the oval face.

He did not speak. There was a time for silence as well as for bold speech. His next move depended entirely on the Shaykh’s next words. A word would brand him as an imposter and defeat his whole plan. But he depended on two things: the belief that no Eastern ruler would order El Borak slain without first trying to learn the reason behind his presence; and the fact that few Eastern rulers either enjoy the full confidence of their followers, or wholly trust those followers in their turn.

The man on the throne gave back Gordon’s burning stare for a space, then spoke at, but not to the Kurd: “This is the law of Shalizahr: the Watchers of the Stair must allow no man to ascend the Stair until he has made the Sign so they can see. If he is a stranger who does not know the Sign, the Warder of the Gate must be summoned to converse with the man before he is allowed to mount the Stair. El Borak was not announced. The Warder of the Gate was not summoned. Did El Borak make the Sign, below the Stair?”

Yusuf ibn Suleiman was pale and sweating, as he plainly wavered between a dangerous truth, and a lie that might be even more dangerous. He shot a venomous glance at Gordon and spoke in a voice harsh with apprehension: “The guard in the cleft did not give warning. El Borak appeared upon the cliff before we saw him, though we stood at the head of the Stair watching like eagles. He is a magician who makes himself invisible at will. We knew he spoke truth when he said you had sent for him, otherwise he could not have known the secret way—”

Perspiration beaded the Kurd’s narrow forehead. The man on the throne did not seem to hear his voice, and Muhammad ibn Ahmed, quick to sense that the Kurd had fallen in disfavour, struck Yusuf savagely in the mouth with his open hand.

“Dog, be silent until the Protector of the Pitiful deigns to command thy speech!”

Yusuf reeled, blood starting down his beard, and looked black murder at the Arab, but he said nothing.

The Persian moved his hand languidly, yet with impatience.

“Take the Kurds away. Keep them under guard until further orders. Even if a man is expected, they should not be surprised. El Borak did not know the Sign, yet he climbed the Stair unhindered. If they had been vigilant not even El Borak could have done this. He is no magician. Send other men to watch the Stair.

“You have my leave to go; I will talk to El Borak alone.” Muhammad ibn Ahmed salaamed and led his glittering swordsmen away between the silent files of spearmen lined on each side of the door, herding the shivering Kurds before them. These turned as they passed through the door and fixed their burning eyes on Gordon in a silent glare of hate.

Muhammad ibn Ahmed pulled the bronze doors shut behind them. The Persian spoke in English to Gordon.

“Speak freely. These black men do not understand English.”

Gordon, before replying, kicked a divan up before the dais and settled himself comfortably on it, with his feet propped on a velvet footstool. He had not established his prestige in the Orient by meek bearing or timid behaviour. Where another man might have tip-toed, hat in hand and heart in mouth, Gordon strode with heavy boots and heavy hand, and because he was El Borak, he lived where other men died. His attitude was no bluff. He was ready at all times to back up his play with hot lead and cold steel, and men knew it, just as they knew that he was the most dangerous man with any sort of weapon between Cairo and Peking.

The Persian showed no surprise that his captive—or guest—should seat himself without asking permission. His first words showed that he had had much dealings with Westerners, and had, for his own purposes, adopted some of their directness. For he said, without preamble: “I did not send for you.”

“Of course not. But I had to tell those fools something, or else kill them all.”

“What do you want here?”

“What does any man want who comes to a nest of outlaws?”

“He might come as a spy,” pointed out the Shaykh.

Gordon laughed at him. “For whom?”

“How did you know the Road?”

Gordon took refuge in the obscurity of Eastern subtlety. “I followed the vultures; they always lead me to my goal.”

“They should,” was the grim reply. “You have fed them full often enough. What of the Mongol who watched the cleft?”

“Dead; he wouldn’t listen to reason.”

“The vultures follow you, not you the vultures,” commented the Shaykh. “Why did you not send word to me of your coming?”

“Send word by whom? Last night as I camped in the Gorge of Ghosts, resting my horses before I pushed on to Shalizahr, a gang of your fools fell on my party in the darkness, killed one and carried another away. The fourth man was frightened and ran away. I came on alone as soon as the moon rose.”

“They were Yezidees, whose duty it is to watch the Gorge of Ghosts. They did not know you sought me. They limped into the city at dawn, with one man dying and most of the others sorely wounded, and swore that they had slain a sahib and his servants in the Gorge of Ghosts. Evidently they feared to admit that they ran away, leaving you alive. They shall smart for their lie. But you have not told me why you came here.”

“I seek refuge. And I bring news. The man you sent to kill the Amir wounded him and was himself cut to pieces by the Uzbek guardsmen.”

The Persian shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

“Your news is stale. We knew that before the noon of the day after the night the execution was attempted. And we have since learned that the Amir will live, because an English physician cleansed the wounds of the poison which was on the dagger.“

That sounded like black magic, until Gordon remembered the pigeons in the courtyard. Carrier birds, of course, and agents in Kabul to release them with the messages.

“We have kept our secret well,” said the Persian. “Since you knew of Shalizahr and the Road to Shalizahr, you must have been told of it by some one of the Brotherhood. Did Bagheela send you?”

Gordon’s pause before replying was no longer than it took him to flick a bit of dust from his breeches, but in that space he recognized the trap laid for him and avoided it. He had no idea who Bagheela was, and this innocent-appearing question was too obviously a bait an imposter might be tempted to seize.

“I don’t know the man you call Bagheela,” he answered. “No one took me into his confidence. I don’t have to be told secrets. I learn them for myself. I came here because I had to have a hide-out. I’m out of favour at Kabul, and the English would have me shot if they could catch me.”

One of the most persistent legends in circulation about Gordon was that he was an enemy of the English. This had a basis in his refusal to be awed by gold braid and brass buttons, and in his comings and goings in tranquil disregard of all rules and regulations that apply to the general run of folk. He had no reverence for the authority which bedecks itself in pomp and arrogance and arbitrary worship of precedence, and he did have an abiding contempt for certain types of officials, whether civilian or military; so he was violently hated by the latter, and their opinion was sometimes accepted by the unthinking as an index of governmental opinion. But the men who actually rule India, moving unobtrusively behind the scenes, knew El Borak for what he really was, and though they did not always approve of his methods, they were his friends, and had profited by his aid time and again.

But the Persian had no way of knowing this. He knew just enough about Gordon to be readily deceived as to the American’s true character. Much of the tales he had heard about him had been lies, or facts distorted out of all proportion. To the Shaykh El Borak was just another lawless adventurer, not quite gone native, but still beyond the pale of respectability, and therefore quite likely to fall foul of the government at any time.

He said something in scholarly and archaic Persian and Gordon, knowing that he would not change the language of their conversation without a subtle reason, feigned ignorance of the tongue. Sometimes the deviousness of the East is childishly transparent.

The Shaykh spoke to one of the blacks, and that giant stolidly drew a silver hammer from his girdle and smote a golden gong hanging among the tapestries. The echoes had scarcely died away when the bronze doors opened long enough to admit a slim man in plain silken robes who stood bowing before the dais: a Persian, like the Shaykh. The latter addressed him as Musa, and asked him a question in the tongue he had just tested on Gordon.

“You know this man?”

“Aye, ya Sidna; he is—”

“Do not speak his name; he does not understand us, but he would recognize his name and know we discussed him. Have our spies included him in their reports?”

“Yes, ya Sidna. The last despatch from Kabul bore word of him. On the night that your servant attempted to execute the Amir, this man talked with the Amir secretly, an hour or so before the attack was made. After leaving the palace, he fled from the city with three men, and was seen riding along the road that leads to the village of the outlaw, Baber Khan of Khor. He was pursued by horsemen from Kabul, but whether they gave up the chase or were slain by the men of Khor, I do not know.”

“It would seem he spoke truth, then, when he said he was out of favour at Kabul,”mused the Shaykh.

Gordon, lounging on the divan and showing no sign that he understood, realized two things: the spy system of the Hidden Ones was more elaborate and far-reaching than he had guessed; and a chain of misunderstood circumstances were working in his favour. It was natural for these men to think that he had fled from Kabul under the shadow of royal displeasure. That he should ride for the village of an outlaw would seem to clinch the matter, as well as the fact of his “pursuit” by the royal horsemen.

“You have my leave to go.”

Musa bowed and departed, closing the doors, and the Shaykh meditated in silence for a space. Presently he lifted his head, as if coming to a decision, and said: “I believe you are telling me the truth. You fled from Kabul, to Khor, where no friend of the Amir would be welcome. And your enmity toward the English is well known. The Batinis need such a man as you. But I can not initiate you into the Brotherhood until the lord Bagheela sees and passes on you. He is not in Shalizahr at the present, but he will be here by tomorrow dawn.

“In the meantime, I would like to know how you learned of our society and of our city.”

Gordon shrugged his shoulders.

“What is concealed from me of the mysteries of the Hills? I hear the secrets the wind sings as it blows through the branches of the dry tamarisks. I understand the cry of the kites as they wheel above the gorges of Gomul. I know what tales are whispered about the dung-fires that the men of the caravans build in the crowded serais.”

“Then you know our purpose? Our ambition?”

“I know what you call yourselves. Long ago there was another city on a mountain, ruled by emirs who called themselves Shaykhs Al Jebal—the Old Men of the Mountain. Their followers were called Assassins. They were hemp-eaters, hashish addicts, and their terrorist methods made the Shaykhs feared all over Western Asia.”

“Aye!” a dark fire lit the Persian’s eyes. “Saladin himself feared them. The Crusaders feared them. The Shah of Persia, the emirs of Damascus, the Khalifs of Baghdad,the Sultans of Egypt and of the Seljuks paid tribute to the Shaykhs Al Jebal. They did not lead armies in the field; they fought by poison and fire and the triple-bladed dagger that bit in the dark. Their scarlet-cloaked emissaries of death went forth with hidden daggers to do their bidding. And kings died in Cairo, in Jerusalem, in Samarcand, in Brusa. On Mount Alamut, in Persia, the first Shaykh, Hassan ibn Sabah, built his great castle-city, with its hidden gardens where his followers were permitted to taste the joys of paradise where dancing girls fair as houris flitted among the blossoms and the dreams of hashish gilded all with rapture.”

“The follower was drugged and placed in the garden,” grunted Gordon. “He thought he was in the Prophet’s Paradise. Later he was drugged again and removed, and told that to regain this rapture he had only to obey the Shaykh to the death. No king was ever given such absolute obedience as the fedauis accorded the Shaykhs. Until the Mongols under Hulagu Khan destroyed their mountain castles in 1256, they threatened Oriental civilization with destruction. ”

“Aye! And I am a direct descendent of Hassan ibn Sabah!” A fanatical light gleamed in the dark eyes. “Throughout my youth I dreamed of the greatness of my ancestors. Wealth that flowed suddenly from the barren lands of my family—western money that came to me from minerals found there—made the dream become reality. Othman ell Aziz became Shaykh Al Jebal!

“Hassan ibn Sabahwas a follower of Ismail, who taught that all deeds and men are one in the sight of Allah. The Ismailian creed is broad and deep as the sea. It overlooks racial and religious differences, and unites men of opposing sects. It is the one power that can ultimately lead to a united Asia. The people of my own native hills had not forgotten the teachings of Ismail, nor the gardens of the hashishin. It was from them I recruited my first followers. But others soon flocked to me in the mountains of Kurdistan where I had my first stronghold—Yezidees, Kurds, Druses, Arabs, Persians, Turks—outlaws, men without hope, who were ready even to forswear Mohammed for a taste of Paradise on earth. But the Batini creed forswears nothing; it unites. My emissaries travelled throughout Asia, drawing followers to me. I chose my men carefully. My band has grown slowly, for each member was tested to prove that he was fit for my service. Race and creed makes no difference; I have among my fedauis Moslems, Hindus, worshippers of Melek Taus from Mount Lalesh, worshippers of Erlik from the Gobi.

“Four years ago I came with my followers to this city, then a crumbling mass of ruins, unknown to the hillmen because their superstitious legends kept them far from it. Centuries ago it was a city of the Assassins, and was laid waste by the Mongols. When I came the buildings were crumbled stone, the canals filled with rubble, the groves grown wild and tangled. It took three years to rebuild it, and most of my fortune went into the labour, for bringing material here secretly was tedious and dangerous work. We brought it out of Persia, from the west, over the old caravan route, and up an ancient ramp on the western side of the plateau, which I have since destroyed. But at last I looked upon forgotten Shalizahr as it was in the days of the ancient Shaykhs.”

“Look!” He rose and beckoned Gordon to follow him. The giant blacks closed in on each side of the Shaykh, and he led the way into an alcove unsuspected until one of the negroes drew aside a tapestry behind the throne. They stood in a latticed balcony looking down into a garden enclosed by a fifteen-foot wall, which wall was almost completely masked by thick shrubbery. An exotic fragrance rose from masses of trees, shrubs and blossoms, and silvery fountains tinkled musically. Gordon saw women moving among the trees, unveiled and scantily clad in filmy silk and jewel-crusted velvet—slim, supple girls, Arab and Persian and Hindu, mostly, and he suddenly saw the explanation of the mysterious disappearance of certain Indian girls, which of late years had increased too greatly to be explained by casual kidnappings by native princelings. Men, looking like opium­sleepers, lay under the trees on silken cushions, and native music wailed melodiously from unseen musicians. It was easy to understand how an Oriental, his senses at once drugged and inflamed by hashish, would believe himself to be in the Prophet’s Paradise, upon awakening in that fantastic garden.

“I have copied, and improved upon, the hashish garden of Hassan ibn Sabah,” said the Shaykh, at last closing the cleverly disguised casement and turning back into the throne­room. “I show you this because I do not intend to have you ‘taste Paradise’ like these others. I am not such a fool as to believe that you would be duped like them. It is not necessary. It does no harm for you to know these secrets. If Bagheela does not approve of you, your knowledge will die with you; if he does, then you have learned no more than you will learn in any event as one of the Sons of the Mountain.

“You can rise high in the empire I am building. I shall become as powerful as my ancestor was. Three years I was preparing. Then I began to strike. Within the last year my fedauis have gone forth with poisoned daggers as they went forth in the old days, knowing no law but my will, incorruptible, invincible, seeking death rather than life.”

“And your ultimate ambition?”

“Have you not guessed it?” The Persian almost whispered it, his eyes wide and blank with his strange fanaticism.

“Who wouldn’t? But I’d rather hear it from your lips. ”

“I will rule all Asia! Sitting here in Shalizahr I will control the destinies of the world! Kings on their thrones will be but puppets dancing on my strings. Those who dare disobey my commands shall die suddenly. Soon none will dare disobey. Power will be mine. Power! Allah! What is greater?”

Gordon did not reply. He was comparing the Shaykh’s repeated references to his absolute power, with his remarks concerning the mysterious Bagheela who must decide Gordon’s status. This would seem to indicate that the Shaykh’s authority was not supreme in Shalizahr, after all. Gordon wondered who this Bagheela was. The term merely meant panther, and was probably a title like his own native name of El Borak.

“Where is the Sikh, Lal Singh?” he demanded abruptly. “Your Yezidees carried him away, after they murdered Ahmed Shah.”

The Persian’s expression of surprise and ignorance was overdone.

“I do not know to whom you refer. The Yezidees brought back no captive with them from the Gorge of Ghosts.”

Gordon knew he was lying, but also realized that it would be useless to push his questioning further at that time. He could not imagine why Othman should deny knowledge of the Sikh, whom he was sure had been brought into the city, but it might be dangerous to press the matter, after a formal denial by the Persian.

The Shaykh motioned to the black who again smote the gong, and again Musa entered, salaaming.

“Musa will show you to a chamber where food and drink will be brought you,” he said. “You are not a prisoner, of course. No guard will be placed over you. But I must ask you not to leave your chamber until I send for you. My men are suspicious of Feringhi, and until you are formally initiated into the society—”

He left the sentence unfinished.

Chapter Four

Whispering Swords

The impassive Musa conducted Gordon through the bronze doors, past the files of glittering guardsmen, and along a narrow, winding corridor which branched off from the broad hallway. Some distance from the audience-chamber he led Gordon into a chamber with a domed ceiling of ivory and sandal-wood, and one heavy, brass-braced mahogany door. There were no windows. Air and light circulated through concealed apertures in the dome. The walls were hung with rich tapestries, the floor hidden by cushion-strewn carpets. But a velvet divan was the only piece of furniture.

Musa bowed himself out without a word, shutting the door behind him, and Gordon seated himself on the couch. This was the most bizarre situation he had ever found himself in, in the course of a life packed with wild adventures and bloody episodes. He felt out of place in his boots and dusty khakis, in this mysterious city that turned the clock of Time back nearly a thousand years. There was a curious sensation of having strayed out of his own age into a lost and forgotten Past; a Past he had known before. It was almost like a flash of memory in which he saw himself, a black-haired, black­eyed warrior from a far western isle, clad in the chain mail of a Crusader, striding through the intrigue-veiled mazes of an Assassin city.

He shook himself impatiently. He more than half believed in reincarnation, but this affair was no ordinary revival of mysticism. The Shaykh Al Jebal might rule supreme in Shalizahr where sleeping ages woke in immortal life, but Gordon sensed something behind this—a dim gigantic shape looming behind these veils of mystery and illusion.

What was the prize for which the great nations of the world sparred behind locked doors? India! The golden key to Asia.

Something more than the mad whim of a Persian dreamer lay behind this fantastic plot. Rebuilding the city alone would have required a stupendous expenditure of money. He questioned Othman’s assertion that he had supplied the money out of his own private fortune. He doubted if any Persian fortune would have proven sufficient. The building of Shalizahr indicated powerful backing, with unlimited resources.

Then Gordon forgot all other angles of the adventure in concern over the fate of Lal Singh. Impassive in contemplating his own peril, and the destiny of nations, he rose and paced the floor like a caged tiger as he brooded over the mystery of the Sikh’s disappearance. Why had Othman denied knowledge of the prisoner? That had a sinister suggestion.

Gordon seated himself as he heard sandalled feet pad in the corridor outside, and immediately the door opened and Musa entered, followed by a huge negro bearing viands in gold dishes, and a golden jug of wine. Musa closed the door quickly, but not before Gordon had a glimpse of a helmet spike protruding from the tapestries which obviously hid an alcove across the corridor. So Othman had lied when he said no guard would be placed to watch him. Gordon instantly considered himself absolved of any implied agreement to remain in the chamber.

“Wine of Shiraz, sahib, and food,” Musa indicated, unnecessarily. “Presently a girl beautiful as a houri shall be sent to entertain the sahib. ”

Gordon opened his mouth to decline, when he realized that the girl would be sent anyway, to spy on him, so he nodded acquiescingly.

Musa motioned the slave to set down the food, and he himself tasted each dish and sipped liberally of the wine, before bowing himself out of the room, herding the negro before him. Gordon, alert as a hungry wolf in a trap, noted that the Persian tasted the wine last, and that he stumbled slightly as he left the chamber. When the door closed behind the man, Gordon lifted the wine jug and smelled deeply of the contents. Mingled with the scent of the wine, so faint that only nostrils like his could have detected it, was an aromatic odour he recognized. It was not that of a poison, but only a nameless Oriental drug which induced deep slumber for a short time. The taster had hurried to leave the room before he was overcome. Gordon wondered if, after all, Othman planned to have him conveyed to the Garden of the Houris.

Investigation, armed by experience acquired through years of Eastern intrigues convinced him that the food had not been tampered with, and he fell to with gusto.

He had scarcely completed the meal when the door opened again, just long enough to allow a slim, supple figure to slip through: a girl clad in gold breast-plates, jewel-crusted girdle, and filmy silk trousers. She might have stepped out of the harim of Haroun ar Raschid. But Gordon came to his feet like a steel spring uncoiling, for he recognized her even before she lifted her filmy yasmaq.

“Azizun! What are you doing here?”

Her wide dark eyes were dilated with fear and excitement; her words tumbled over another as her white fingers fluttered at his hands in a pathetically childish way.

“They stole me, one night as I walked in my father’s garden in Delhi, sahib.

“They carried me in a caravan of men posing as horse­traders, to Peshawar, and so through the Khyber, and at last to this city of devils, with six other girls stolen in India. Their slave caravans ply constantly under the very sight of the British. The girls are made to sit in the covered wagons, heavily veiled, and not daring to cry out for aid, for a knife is always near them, until the Khyber is passed. Beyond the Khyber none heeds the cries of a stolen woman. In India they are passed as the wives and daughters and sisters of the ‘horse-traders’. At Peshawar there is an Indian official who is in the pay of the Batinis. Scores of Indian girls are passed through the Khyber yearly with his aid.”

Gordon did not swear, but his thoughts were profane and murderous. It stung him to a dangerous rage to reflect that this abominable traffic had been carried on under his very nose; and it also indicated the efficiency and organization of the Ismalians.

“What’s this official’s name?” he asked grimly.

“Ditta Ram.”

“I know the swine!” A contracting of the lip muscles evidenced a ferocious satisfaction as Gordon recognized his opportunity to repay an old score. Then he came back to the present. Exposure of Ditta Ram and a knife-thrust in his fat belly in the fight that was sure to follow, was somewhere in the future. Azizun was speaking, stammering in her haste.

“I have dwelt here for a month! I have almost died of shame. I have seen other girls die under torture. They have made me a ‘houri’ in their foul garden of Paradise. My heart almost burst when I saw you brought in among Muhammad ibn Ahmed’s swordsmen. I was watching from a tapestried doorway. While I racked my brain to get a word with you, the Master of the Girls came to send a girl to the sahib to coax from him his secrets, if he had any. I prevailed upon him to send me. He thinks I am your enemy. I told him you slew my brother.” She meditated for a moment over the enormity of the lie; her brother was one of Gordon’s best friends.

“Tell me, Azizun, do you know anything of Lal Singh, the Sikh?”

“Yes, sahib!They brought him here captive to make a fedaui of him, for no Sikh has yet joined the cult, and the Masters are very desirous of securing one who has power in the Punjab. But Lal Singh is a very powerful man, as the sahib knows, and after they reached the city and delivered him into the hands of the Arab guards, he broke free and with his bare hands slew the brother of Muhammad ibn Ahmed. Muhammad demanded his head and he is too powerful even for Othman to refuse in this matter.”

“So that’s why the Shaykh lied about Lal Singh,” muttered Gordon.

“Yes, sahib. Lal Singh lies in a dungeon below the palace, and tomorrow he is to be given to the Arab for torture and execution.”

Gordon’s face did not exactly change its expression, but it darkened and became sinister.

“Lead me tonight to Muhammad’s sleeping quarters,” he requested, his narrowing eyes betraying his deadly intention.

“Nay, he sleeps among his warriors, all proven swordsmen of the desert, too many even for thy blade, Prince of Swords. I will lead you to Lal Singh!”

“What of the guard hidden in the corridor?”

“There is a secret way from this room to the dungeons. He will not see us leave the chamber. And he will not open the door, or allow anyone else to enter until he has seen me leave.”

She drew aside the tapestry on the wall opposite the door and pressed on an arabesqued design. A panel swung inward, revealing a narrow stair that wound down into lightless depths.

“The masters think their slaves do not know their secrets,” she muttered. “Come.” She produced and lighted a tiny candle, and holding it aloft in her slender hand she led the way onto the stair, pulling the panel to after them. They descended until Gordon estimated that they were well beneath the palace, and then struck a narrow, level tunnel which ran away from the foot of the stair.

“We are under one of the outer gardens now,” she said, “A Rajput who planned to run away from Shalizahr showed me this secret way. I planned to escape with him. We hid weapons and food here. He was caught and put to the torture, but died without betraying me. Here is the sword he hid.” She paused and fumbled in a niche, drawing out a blade which she proffered Gordon. He took it, believing that he would need such a weapon before they won clear.

A few moments later they reached a heavy, iron-bound door, and Azizun, gesturing for caution, drew Gordon to it and showed him a tiny aperture to peer through. He looked into a fairly wide corridor, flanked on one side by a blank wall in which showed a single ebon door, curiously ornate and heavily bolted, and on the other by a row of cells with barred doors. The corridor was not long. He could see each end, closed by a heavy door. Archaic bronze lamps hung at intervals cast a mellow glow.

Before one of the cell-doors stood a resplendent Arab in glittering corselet and plumed helmet, scimitar in hand. He was hawk-nosed, black-bearded, his arrogant bearing an assurance of prowess.

Azizun’s fingers tightened on Gordon’s arm.

“Lal Singh is in the cell before which he stands,” she whispered. “Do not shoot the Arab. Slay him in silence. He has no gun and he is proud of his swordsmanship. He will not cry out until he knows he is beaten. The ring of steel will not be heard above.”

Gordon tried the balance of the blade she had given him—a long Indian steel, light but well-nigh unbreakable, razor­edged for slashing, but not curved too much for thrusting. It was the same length as the Arab’s scimitar.

Gordon pushed open the secret door and stepped into the corridor. He saw the bearded face of Lal Singh staring through the bars behind the Arab. Gordon had made no sound as he stepped from his hiding place, but the hidden hinges creaked, and the Arab whirled catlike, snarled with amazement, glared wildly, and then came to the attack with the instant decisiveness of a panther.

Gordon met him half-way, and the wild-eyed Sikh gripping the bars until his knuckles were bloodless, and the Indian girl crouching in the open doorway witnessed a play of swords that would have burned the blood of kings.

The only sounds were the quick, soft, sure shuffle and thud of feet, the slither and rasp of steel on steel, the breathing of the fighters. The long, light blades flickered illusively in the mellow light. They were like living things, like the tongues of serpents, darting and gleaming; like parts of the men who wielded them, welded not only to hand, but to brain as well. To the girl it was bewildering, incomprehensible. But Lal Singh, grown to manhood with a sword in his hand, realized and appreciated to the fullest the superlative skill which scintillated there in lightning intricasies, and he alternately chilled and burned with the bright splendour of the fray.

Even before the Arab, he knew when the hair-line balance shifted; sensed the inevitable outcome an instant before the Arab’s lips drew back from his teeth in ferocious recognition of defeat and desperate resolve to take his enemy with him. But the end came even before Lal Singh realized its imminence. A louder ring of blades, a flash of steel that baffled the eye which sought to follow it—Gordon’s flickering blade seemed lightly to caress his enemy’s neck in passing—and then the Arab was lying in his own blood on the floor, his head all but severed from his body. He had died without a cry.

Gordon stood over him for an instant, the sword in his hand stained with a thread of crimson. His shirt had been torn open and his muscular breast rose and fell easily. Only a film of perspiration which glistened there and on his brow betrayed the strain of his recent exertions.

Stooping he tore a bunch of keys from the dead man’s girdle. The grate of steel in the lock seemed to awaken Lal Singh from a trance.

“Sahib! You are mad to come into this den of snakes! But who would have thought an Arab could wield such a sword! It carried me back to the old days when we matched our steel against the finest blades of the Turks!”

“Come on out.” Gordon pulled open the door, and the Sikh stepped forth, light and supple as a great panther. Without a turban, and half-naked, yet his condition did not decrease the manliness of his bearing.

Gordon thought rapidly.

“We won’t have a chance if we make a break before dark. Azizun, how soon will another come to relieve the man I killed?“

“They change guards every four hours in these dungeons. His watch had just begun.”

“Good! That gives us four hours lee-way.” He glanced at his watch and was surprised to note the hour. He had been in Shalizahr much longer than he had realized.

“Within four hours it will be sun-down. As soon as it’s well dark, we’ll make our break to get away. Until we’re ready Lal Singh will hide on the secret stairway.”

“But when the guard comes to relieve this man,” said the Sikh, “it will be known that I have escaped from my cell. You should have left me here until you were ready to go, sahib.”

“I didn’t dare risk it. I might not have been able to get you out when the time came. We have four hours before they’ll be likely to find you’re gone. When they do, maybe the confusion will help us. We’ll hide this body somewhere.”

He turned toward the curiously decorated door, but Azizun gasped, grasping his arm: “Not that way, sahib! Would you open the door to hell?”

“What do you mean? What lies beyond that door?”

“I do not know. The bodies of executed men and women are thrown over the edge of the plateau for the kites to devour. But through this door are carried wretches who have been tortured but still live. What becomes of them I do not know, but I have heard them scream, more terribly than they did under the torture. The girls say that a djinn has his lair beyond that door, and that he refuses to devour the dead, but accepts only living sacrifices.”

“That may be,” said Lal Singh skeptically. “But I saw a slave some hours ago open that door and hurl something through it which was neither a man nor a woman, though what it was I could not tell.”

“It was doubtless an infant,” she shuddered.

But Gordon was already dragging the body of the Arab into the cell and stripping it. He instructed Lal Singh to enter the cell and doff the rags left him by his captors, and he clothed the dead man in the Sikh’s garments and laid the body in the furtherest corner, with his back to the door, and his gashed throat invisible to the casual glance. The Arab was not as tall as the Sikh but in the doubled-up position that fact would not be so noticeable. Lal Singh donned such of the dead man’s garments and accoutrements as would fit, which did not include the helmet and corselet; these he brought with him to hide in the secret tunnel. Gordon locked the cell door behind them, and gave the keys to the Sikh.

“Nothing we can do about the blood on the floor. When the other guard comes, maybe he’ll think the Arab is you, asleep or dead, and start looking for the original guard instead of you. The longer it is before they find you’ve escaped, the more time we’ll have. I haven’t made any definite plan about escaping from the city; that will depend on circumstances. If I find I can’t get away I’ll kill Othman—and the rest will be on the lap of Allah.

“In case you two make it, and I don’t, try to get back along the trail and meet the Ghilzai as they come. I sent Yar Ali Khan after them. He started back at dawn. If he found the horses safe he should reach Khor shortly after nightfall. The Ghilzai should reach the canyon below the plateau sometime tomorrow morning.”

They returned to the secret door, which, when closed, presented the illusion of being part of the blank stone wall,—and pausing only long enough for Azizun to relight her candle, they traversed the tunnel and mounted the stair.

“Here you must hide until the time comes,” said Gordon. “Take the swords, and the candle, and my electric torch. And this, too.” He forced the big blue pistol on him, despite his demur.

“You’ll need it before the night’s over. If anything happens to me, take the girl and try to get away after dark. If neither of us comes for you within four hours, open the panel-door and make a break for it alone.”

“As you will, sahib. It is my shame that I was taken unawares. But the Yezidees stole out of the ravine like cats, and one struck me down with a stone thrown from a sling before I was aware of them, they standing back in the darkness where the devil himself could not have seen them. When I came to myself I was gagged and my arms bound behind me. In the same way, they told me, they smote down Ahmed Shah. But then they cut his throat, because these Ismalians will have nothing to do with the hill-folk, fearing such men would talk to their kin, and so betray the secret of Shalizahr. The Yezidees are like cats which steal in the dark. Nevertheless it is a great shame upon me.”

And so saying he seated himself cross-legged on the top-most step and settled himself for his long vigil with the tranquillity of his race.

When Gordon and Azizun were back in the chamber, and Azizun had carefully hung the tapestry over the fake-panel, Gordon said: “You’d better go now. If you stay too long they may get suspicious. Contrive to return to me here as soon as it’s well dark. I have an idea that I’m to remain in this chamber until this fellow Bagheela returns. When you come back, tell the guard outside that the Shaykh sent you. I’ll attend to him when we’re ready to go. And by the way, they sent this drugged wine just before you left. Tell them you saw me drink it. That you searched me and found I was not armed. I think I know why they sent it.”

“Yes, sahib! I will return after dark.” The girl was trembling with fear and excitement, but she controlled herself admirably. There was pity in Gordon’s black eyes as he watched her slender figure, carried bravely, pass through the door. Petted daughter of a rich Moslem merchant of Delhi, she was not accustomed to such treatment as she had received in Shalizahr. But she was holding herself up well.

Gordon took up the wine jug, smeared just enough wine on his lips to make a scent that would be detected by keen nostrils, then he emptied the contents in a nook behind the tapestries, and threw himself on the divan in an attitude of slumber, the jug lying on the floor near his hand.

Only a few minutes elapsed until the door opened again. A girl entered. He did not open his eyes, but he knew it was a girl by the light rustle of her bare feet on the thick carpets, and by the scent of her perfume, just as he knew by the same evidences that it was not Azizun returning. Evidently the Shaykh did not place too much trust or responsibility upon any one woman. Gordon did not believe she had been sent there to murder him—poison in the wine would have been sufficient for that purpose—so he did not take the risk of peering through slitted lids.

That the girl was afraid was evident by the quick tremor of her breathing as she bent over him. Her nostrils all but touched his lips, and he heard her sigh of relief as she thought she smelled the drugged wine on his breath. Her soft hands stole over him, searching for hidden weapons, and as she felt the empty scabbard under his left arm-pit he was glad that he had left the pistol with Lal Singh. To keep up the deception he would have been forced to allow her to take it.

She glided away, the door closed softly, and he lay quietly. Might as well take it easy. Four hours must pass before he could make any kind of a move. Long ago he had learned to snatch food and sleep when he could. He was playing a game with Life and Death for stakes. His masquerade hung by a hair. His life and the lives of his companions depended upon his finding a way to escape from the plateau that night. He had no plan as yet; had no idea as to how they were to escape from the city and descend the cliffs. He was gambling that he would be able to find or make a way when the time came. And in the meantime he slept, as tranquilly and soundly as if he lay in the house of a friend, in the safety of his native country.

Chapter Five

The Mask Falls

Like most men who live by the skin of their teeth, Gordon had acquired the knack of sleeping just so long as he wished, and waking when he chose. But he was not allowed to sleep out his four hours.

His slumber was healthy and sound, but he awoke the instant a hand touched the door. Awoke and came to his feet as Musa entered, with the inevitable salaam.

“The Shaykh Al Jebal desires your presence, sahib. The lord Bagheela has returned. ”

So the mysterious Panther had returned sooner than the Shaykh had expected. Gordon felt a premonitory tenseness as he followed the Persian out of the chamber. A sidewise glance showed a bulge in the tapestry where he had glimpsed the helmet; the guard was still there.

Musa did not lead him back to the chamber where the Shaykh had first received him. He was conducted through a winding corridor to a gilded door before which stood an Arab swordsman. This man opened the door, and Musa hurried Gordon across the threshold. The door closed behind them, and Gordon halted suddenly.

He stood in a broad room without windows, but with several doors. Across the chamber the Shaykh lounged on a divan with his black slaves behind him, and clustered about him were a dozen armed men of various races: Kurds, Druses and Arabs, and an Orakzai, the first Pathan Gordon had seen in Shalizahr—a hairy, ragged, scarred villain whom Gordon knew as Khuruk Khan, a thief and murderer.

But the American spared these men only the briefest sort of a glance. All his attention was fixed on the man who dominated the scene. This man stood between him and the Shaykh’s divan, with the wide-legged stance of a horseman—handsome in a dark, saturnine way. He was taller than Gordon, and more wiry in build, this leanness being emphasized by his close-fitting breeches and riding boots. One hand caressed the butt of the heavy automatic which hung at his thigh, the other stroked his thin black mustache. And Gordon knew the game was up. For this was Ivan Konaszevski, a Cossack, who knew El Borak too well to be deceived as the Shaykh had been.

“This is the man,” said Othman. “He desires to join us.”

The man they called Bagheela the Panther smiled thinly.

“He has been playing a role. El Borak would never turn renegade. He is here as a spy for the English.”

The eyes fixed on the American grew suddenly murderous. No more than Bagheela’s word was necessary to convince his followers. Gordon laughed aloud, and none who heard him understood why. Ivan Konaszevski did not understand. He knew Gordon well enough to sift truth from falsehood and understand his real purpose in Shalizahr. But he did not know him well enough to understand that laugh, or to understand the dark flame that rose in the black eyes.

Gordon’s laughter was not of self-mockery, or of that cynicism which derides its own defeat. Under Gordon’s inscrutable exterior lurked the untamed soul of a berserker. He had long learned the unwisdom of fighting except as a last resort. But now the game was up. All masks were fallen. He had done all he could with subtlety and intrigue. His back was at the wall, and fighting was all that was left for him. He could plunge into the bright madness of battle without doubts or regrets or consideration of consequences. The laughter that so amazed his enemies rose in ferocious exultation from the depths of his elemental soul. But for the moment he held himself in check; the burning flame in his eyes was all there was to warn his enemies, and they did not recognize that warning.

The Shaykh made a gesture of repudiation.

“In these matters I always defer to your judgment, Bagheela. You know the man. I do not. Do what you will. Do not fear. He is unarmed.”

At the assurance of the helplessness of their prey, wolfish cruelty sharpened the faces of the warriors, and Khuruk Khan half-drew a three-foot Khyber knife from its embroidered scabbard. There was plenty of edged steel in evidence, but only the Cossack had a gun in sight.

“That will make it easier,” laughed Konaszevski, then slipped into Russian which the Persian did not seem to understand. “Gordon, you were mad to come here. You should have known that you would meet someone who knew you as you really are—not as these fools think you are.”

“You were the joker in the deck,” admitted Gordon. “I didn’t know the natives called you Bagheela. That was what trapped me. But I knew some European power must be behind this masquerade. Your masters have dreams of an Asiatic empire, do they not? So they sent you to combine forces with a fanatic; help build him a city, and make a tool out of him. They supplied the money, and European wits and weapons. What do they hope to do? Supplant each Asiatic ruler now friendly to England with a puppet to obey their orders? Intimidate hostile sultans and pashas with the fear of assassination, to secure favourable treaties and concessions?”

“In part,” admitted Konaszveski calmly. “This is but one strand in a far-flung web of imperial ambition. I will not bother to remind you that you might have a part in the coming empire if you were wise. I know your stubbornness in refusing to do anything against the interests of British rule in India, though I cannot understand why. You are an American. And you are not even English by descent. Even before your ancestors crossed the Atlantic they had fought the English for centuries.”

Gordon smiled bleakly.

“I care nothing for England as a nation. But India is better off under her rule than it would be under men who employ such tools as yourself. By the way, who are your masters just now? The agents of the Czar—or somebody else?”

“That will make little difference to you, shortly!” Konaszevski showed his white teeth beneath the wiry black moustache in a light laugh. Othman and his men were shifting uneasily, irked at being unable to follow the conversation. The Cossack shifted to Arabic. “Your end will be interesting to watch. They say you are as stoical as the red Indians of your country. I am curious to test that reputation. Bind him, men—”

His gesture as he reached for the automatic at his hip was leisurely. He knew Gordon was dangerous, but he had never seen the black-haired Westerner in action; he could not realize the savage quickness that lurked in El Borak’s hard thews. Before the Cossack could draw his pistol Gordon sprang and struck as a panther slashes. The impact of his clenched fist was like that of a trip-hammer and Konaszevski went down, blood spurting from his jaw, the pistol slipping from its holster.

Before Gordon could snatch the weapon, Khuruk Khan was upon him. Only the Pathan realized Gordon’s deadly quickness and ferocity of attack, and even he had not been swift enough to save the Cossack. But he kept Gordon from securing the pistol, for El Borak had to whirl and grapple as the three-foot Khyber knife rose above him. Gordon caught the knife-wrist as it fell, checking the stroke in mid-air, the iron sinews springing out on his own wrist in the effort. His right hand ripped a dagger from the Pathan’s girdle and sank it to the hilt under his ribs almost with the same motion. Khuruk Khan groaned and sank down dying, and Gordon wrenched away the long knife as he crumpled.

All this had happened in a stunning explosion of speed, embracing a mere tick of time. Konaszevski was down and Khuruk Khan was dying before the others could get into action, and when they did they were met by the yard-long knife in the hand of the most terrible knife-fighter North of the Khyber.

Even as he whirled to meet the rush, the long blade licked out and a Kurd went down, choking out his life through a severed jugular. An Arab shrieked, disembowelled. A Druse overreached with a ferocious dagger-lunge, and reeled away, clutching the crimson-gushing stump of a wrist.

Gordon did not put his back to the wall; he sprang into the thick of his foes, wielding his dripping knife murderously. They swirled and milled about him; he was the centre of a whirlwind of blades that flickered and lunged and slashed, and yet somehow missed their mark again and again as he shifted his position constantly and so swiftly that he baffled the eye which sought to follow him. Their numbers hindered them; they cut thin air or gashed one another, confused by his speed and demoralized by the wolfish ferocity of his onslaught.

At such deadly close quarters the long knife was more effective than the scimitars and tulwars. In the hands of a man who knows how to wield it there is no more murderous weapon in the universe. And Gordon had long ago mastered its every use, whether the terrible downward swing that splits a skull, or the savage upward rip that spills out a man’s entrails.

It was butcher’s work, but El Borak made no false motion; he was never in doubt or confused. There was no uncertainty or hesitation in his attack. He waded through that melee of straining bodies and lashing blades like a typhoon, and he left a red wake behind him.

The sense of time is lost in the daze of battle. In reality the melee lasted only a matter of moments, then the survivors gave back, stunned and appalled by the havoc wrought among them. El Borak wheeled, located the Shaykh who had retreated to the further wall, flanked by the stolid Sudanese—then even as Gordon’s leg-muscles tensed for a leap, a shout brought him half-way round.

A group of Arab guardsmen appeared at the door opening into the corridor, levelling their rifles at him, while those in the room scurried out of the line of fire. Gordon’s hesitation endured only for the fleetest tick of time, while the guns were coming to a level. In that flash of consciousness he weighed his chances of reaching the Shaykh and killing him before he himself died—knew that he would be struck in mid-air by at least half a dozen bullets, but did not hesitate to match his ferocious vitality against death itself.

And then—everything seemed to be happening at once—before Gordon could leap or the Arabs could loose their volley, a door to the right crashed inward and a blast of lead raked the ranks of the riflemen. Lal Singh! With the first crack of the big blue pistol in the Sikh’s hand Gordon altered his plans from death to life. He charged the Arabs in the doorway instead of the Shaykh.

Thrown into confusion by the unexpected blast which mowed down three men and set others to staggering and crying out, the Arabs fell into demoralized confusion. Some fired wildly at the Sikh, some at Gordon as he charged them, and all missed, as is inevitable when men’s attention is divided. And as they fired futilely Gordon was among with a rush and a gigantic bound. His dripping blade spattered blood and left a wake of writhing, dripping figures behind him—then he was through the milling mob and racing down the corridor, shouting for Lal Singh as he headed to pass the corridor of the adjoining chamber from which the Sikh had fired.

Lal Singh, the instant he saw Gordon plunge through the band of guards, slammed the bronze door between the rooms, grinning as he heard bullets flatten on the metal, then turned and rushed toward the door that opened into the corridor. But even as he reached the threshold, answering Gordon’s shout, a hand came out from behind the tapestry, clutching a bludgeon. The Sikh did not see it, and his convulsive movement, as Gordon yelled warning, was too late. The cudgel crashed on his unprotected head and he reeled backward and toppled down through an aperture which opened suddenly in the floor and then closed above his falling body.

With a snarl Gordon leaped at the tapestry but his slashing blade only ripped velvet and rang on stone. Whoever had lurked there had already withdrawn into some secret niche.

The Sikh had been precipitated—whether dead or alive—through a concealed trap door, and Gordon could not help him now. The trap was closed, and men were pouring into the corridor, firing wildly. The echoes of their shots slapped deafeningly up and down along the walls of the corridor.

Gun butts hammered on the bronze door the Sikh had slammed. Gordon slammed the door to the corridor, ran around the room, skirting the wall so as to avoid the trap in the middle of the floor, and threw open a door opposite the bronze door. He came into a narrow corridor that ran off at right angles from the main hallway. At the other end was a gold-barred window. A Kurd sprang up from an alcove, lifting a rifle. Gordon came at him like a mountain storm. Daunted by the sight of the savage, blood-stained white man, the Kurd fired without aiming, missed, and jammed the lock of his rifle. He shrieked, tore desperately at the bolt, then threw up his hands and screamed as Gordon, maddened by the fate of the Sikh, struck with murderous fury. The Kurd’s head jumped from his shoulders on a spurt of crimson and thudded to the floor.

Gordon lunged at the window, hacked once at the bars with his knife, then gripped them with both hands and braced his legs. A heaving surge of iron strength, a savage wrench, and the bars came away in his hands with a splintering crash. He plunged through into a latticed balcony overlooking a garden. Behind him men were storming down the narrow corridor. Rifles cracked spitefully and lead spattered about him. He dived at the lattice-work head first, the knife extended before him—smashed through the flimsy material without checking his flight and hit catlike on his feet in the garden below.

The garden was empty but for half a dozen scantily-clad women who screamed and ran. He raced toward the opposite wall, quartering among the low trees to avoid the bullets that rained after him: Hot lead ripped through the branches, rattling among the leaves. A backward glance showed the broken lattice crowded with furious faces and arms brandishing weapons. Another shout warned him of peril ahead.

A man was running along the wall, swinging a tulwar.

The fellow, a fleshily-built Kurd, had accurately judged the point where the fugitive would reach the wall, but he himself reached that point a few seconds too late. The wall was not higher than a man’s head. Gordon caught the coping with one hand and swung himself up almost without checking his speed, and an instant later, on his feet on the parapet, ducked the sweep on the tulwar and drove his knife through the Kurd’s huge belly.

The man bellowed like an ox in pain, threw his arms about his slayer in a death-grip, and they went over the parapet together. Gordon had only time to glimpse the sheer-walled ravine which gaped below them. They struck on its narrow lip, rolled off and fell fifteen feet to crash sickeningly on the rocky floor of that ravine. As they rushed downward Gordon turned in mid-air so that the Kurd was under him when they hit, and the fat, limp body cushioned his fall. Even so it jolted the breath out of him and left him gasping and half-stunned. Above him a rifle was poked over the wall.

Chapter Six

The Haunter of the Gulches

Gordon staggered to his feet, empty handed, glaring in hypnotic fascination at the black ring that was the rifle muzzle trained full upon him. Behind it a bearded face froze in a yellow-fanged grin of murder.

Then a hand dragged aside the barrel as the wall was lined with turbaned heads. The man who had struck up the rifle barrel laughed and pointed down the ravine, and the man with the gun hesitated, and then grinned malevolently. Gordon scowled up at the row of bearded faces that looked down at him, all grinning as if at a grim jest. Some laughed derisively, and others shouted replies to questions hurled by some unseen party.

Gordon stood motionless, unable to comprehend the attitude of his enemies. When he rose to face that rifle he had expected nothing but an instant blast of lead; but the warriors had not fired, and seemingly had no intention of firing.

Another countenance appeared above him—a blood­stained face, adorned with a black moustache. Konaszevski was rather pale under his dark skin, and his expression was no less malignant.

“Out of the frying pan into the fire, as you damned Americans say,” he laughed viciously. “Well, I had other plans for you—” he dabbed with a bit of silk at the cut on his chin—“but this suits me well enough. I leave you to your meditations. You are no longer important enough to take up my time, and I certainly have no intention of allowing you to be put out of misery with a merciful rifle-shot. Farewell, dead man!”

And with a brusque word to his followers, he disappeared.

The turbans vanished from the parapet like apples rolled off a wall, and Gordon stood alone except for the dead man sprawling near his feet.

Gordon frowned as he looked suspiciously about him. He knew that the southern end of the plateau was cut up into a network of ravines, and obviously he was in one which ran out of that network to the south of the palace. It was a straight gulch, like a giant knife-cut, thirty feet in width, which ran out of a maze of gullies straight toward the city, ceasing abruptly at a sheer cliff of solid stone below the garden wall from which he had fallen. This cliff was fifteen feet in height and too smooth to be wholly the work of nature.

Ten feet from the end-wall, the ravine deepened abruptly, the rocky floor falling away some five feet. He stood on a kind of natural shelf at the end of the ravine. The side-walls were sheer, showing evidences of having been smoothed by tools. Across the rim of the wall at the end, and for fifteen feet on each side, ran a strip of iron with short razor-edged blades slanting down. They had not cut him as he fell over them, but anyone trying to climb the wall, even if he reached the rim by some miracle, would be gored to pieces trying to swarm up over them. The strips on the side walls overreached the edge of the shelf below, and beyond that point the walls were more than twenty feet in height. Gordon was in a prison, partly natural, partly man-made.

Looking down the ravine he saw that it widened and broke into a tangle of smaller gulches, separated by ridges of solid stone, beyond and above which he saw the gaunt bulk of the mountain looming up. The other end of the ravine was not blocked in any way, but he knew that his captors would not use so much care in safeguarding one end of his prison while allowing some avenue of escape at the other. But it was not his nature to resign himself to whatever fate they had planned for him. Obviously they thought they had him safely trapped; but other men had thought that before.

He pulled the knife out of the Kurd’s carcass, wiped off the blood and went down the ravine.

A hundred yards from the city-end, he came to the mouths of the smaller ravines, selected one at random, and immediately found himself in a nightmarish labyrinth. Channels hollowed in the almost solid rock meandered bafflingly through a crumbling waste of stone. Mostly they ran roughly north and south, but they merged with one another, split apart, and looped in criss-cross chaos. Most of them seemed to begin without reason and to go nowhere. He was forever coming to the ends of blind alleys which, if he surmounted them, it was only to descend into another equally confusing branch of the insane network.

Sliding down a gaunt ridge his heel crunched something that broke with a dry crack. He had stepped upon the dried rib-bones of a headless skeleton. A few yards away lay the skull, crushed and splintered. He began to stumble upon similar grisly relics with appalling frequency. Each skeleton showed broken bones and a smashed skull. The action of the elements could not have had that destructive an effect. He went more warily, narrowly eyeing every spur of rock or shadowed recess. But he saw no tracks in the few sandy places where a track would have shown that would indicate the presence of any of the large carnivora. In one such place he did indeed come upon a partially effaced track, but it was not the spoor of a leopard, bear or tiger. It looked more like the print of a bare, misshapen human foot. And the bones had not been gnawed as they would have been in the case of a man-eater. They showed no tooth-marks; they seemed simply to have been crushed and broken, as an incredibly powerful man might have broken them. But once he came upon a rough out-jut of rock to which clung strands of coarse grey hair that might have been rubbed off against the stone, and here and there an unpleasant rank odour which he could not define hung in the cave-like recesses beneath the ridges where a beast—or man, or demon!—might conceivably curl up and sleep.

Baffled and balked in his efforts to steer a straight course through the stony maze, he scrambled up a weathered ridge which looked to be higher than most, and crouching on its sharp angle, stared out over the nightmarish waste. His view was limited except to the north but the glimpses he had of sheer cliffs rising above the spurs and ridges to east, west, and south, made him believe that they formed parts of a continuous wall which enclosed the tangle of gullies. To the north this wall was split by the ravine which ran to the outer palace garden.

Presently the nature of the labyrinth became evident. At one time or another part of the plateau which lay between the site of the present city and the mountain had sunk, leaving a great bowl-like depression, and the surface of the depression, had been cut up into gullies by the action of the elements over an immense period of time. There was no use wasting time wandering about in the midst of the gulches. His problem was to make his way to the cliffs that hemmed in the corrugated bowl, and skirt them, to find if there was any way to surmount them. Looking southward he believed he could trace the route of a ravine which was more continuous than the others, and which ran in a more or less direct route to the base of the mountain whose sheer wall hung over the bowl. He also saw that to reach this ravine he would save time by returning to the gulch below the city wall and following another one of the ravines which debouched into it, instead of scrambling over a score or so of knife-edged ridges which lay between him and the gully he wished to reach.

With this purpose in mind he climbed down the ridge and retraced his steps. The sun was swinging low as he re-entered the mouth of the outer ravine, and started toward the gulch he believed would lead him to his objective. He glanced idly toward the cliff at the other end of the wider ravine—and stopped dead in his tracks. The body still lay on the shelf—but it was not lying in the same position in which he had left it—it did not seem so bulky, and the garments looked different. An instant later he was racing along the ravine, springing up on the shelf, bending over the motionless figure. The Kurd he had killed was gone; the man who lay there was Lal Singh!

There was a great lump, clotted with blood, on the back of his head, but the Sikh was not dead. Even as Gordon lifted his head, he blinked dazedly, lifted a hand to his wound, and stared blankly at Gordon.

“Sahib! What has happened? Are we dead and in Hell?”

“In Hell, perhaps; but not dead. Do you have any idea how you came here?”

The Sikh sat up dizzily, holding his head in his hands. He stared about him in amazement.

“Where are we?”

“In a ravine behind the palace. Do you remember being thrown in here?”

“No, sahib. I remember the fight in the palace; nothing thereafter. As I waited in the darkness on the hidden stair, the girl Azizun came in haste and said you had been confronted by a man who knew you. She led me to the chamber adjoining that one in which you were fighting, and I used your pistol to some advantage, as I remember. I was running to the outer door to join you—then something happened. I do not know. I do not remember anything.”

“A fedaui hiding among behind the tapestries knocked you in the head,” grunted Gordon. “Doubtless saw you enter the chamber and sneaked in after you and hid in a secret alcove. The palace seems to be full of them. He slugged you and pulled a rope to open a trap in the floor for you to fall through. I got over a garden wall and fell into this infernal ravine, with a dead Kurd. Evidently while I was exploring down the ravine they took his body out and threw you down here.

“Wait a minute, though! You weren’t thrown. You’d have broken bones, probably a broken neck. They might have come down on ladders, and hoisted the Kurd up, but they certainly wouldn’t take the trouble to ease you down gently. There’s only one alternative. They shoved you through some kind of a door in the cliff somewhere. ”

A few minutes careful searching disclosed the door whose existence he suspected. The thin cracks which advertised its presence would have escaped the casual glance. The door on that side was of the same material as the cliff, and fitted perfectly. It did not yield a particle as both men thrust powerfully upon it.

Gordon marshalled his scraps of knowledge concerning the architecture of the palace, and his eyes narrowed at the conclusion he reached, though he said nothing to the Sikh. He believed that they were looking on the outer side of that curiously decorated door beneath the palace against which Azizun had warned him. The door to Hell! Then he and Lal Singh were in “Hell”, and those splintered bones he had seen lent a sinister confirmation to the legend of a djinn which devoured humans—though he did not believe the owners of those bones had been literally devoured. But something inimical to human beings haunted that maze of ravines. He abandoned all thought of breaking in the door, as he remembered its heavy, metal-bound material and powerful bolts. It would take a company of men with a battering ram to shake that door.

He turned and looked down the gully toward the mysterious labyrinth, wondering what skulking horror its mazes hid. The sun had not yet set, but it was hidden from the gulches; the ravine was full of shadows, though visibility had not yet been appreciably affected.

“The walls are high here,” muttered the Sikh, pressing his hands to his throbbing head. “But they are higher further along the ravine. If you stood on my shoulders and leaped—”

“I’d cut my hands off on those blades.”

“Oh!” The cobwebs were clearing from the Sikh’s brain. “I did not notice. What shall we do, then?”

“Cross that maze of gulches and see what lies beyond it. You know nothing of what became of Azizun, of course?”

“She was running ahead of me until we came to the chamber whence I fired your pistol. I supposed she followed me as I rushed past her into that chamber. But I did not see after I entered it.”

“The fedaui who slugged you must have grabbed her and shoved her into some secret compartment,” growled Gordon, veins swelling slightly on his neck. “Damn them, they’ll torture and kill her—we’ve got to get out of here. Come on.”

A mystical blue twilight hovered over the gulches as Lal Singh and Gordon entered the labyrinth. Threading among winding channels, they came out into a slightly wider gully which Gordon believed was the one he had seen from the ridge, and which ran to the south wall of the bowl. But they had not gone fifty yards when it split on a sharp-edged spur into two narrower gorges. This division had not been visible from the ridge, and Gordon did not know which branch to follow. He decided that the two branches merely ran past the narrow spur, one on each side, and joined again further on. When he spoke his belief to the Sikh, Lal Singh said: “Yet one may be but a blind alley, instead. You take the right branch, and I will take the left, and we will explore them separately.”

And before Gordon could stop him, he was off, half-running down the left hand ravine, and passed out of sight almost instantly. Gordon started to call him back,then stiffened without shouting. Ahead of him, on the right, the mouth of a yet narrower ravine opened into the right-hand gorge, a well of blue shadows. And in that well something moved. Gordon tensed rigidly, staring unbelievingly at the monstrous man-like being which stood in the twilight before him.

It was like the embodied spirit of this nightmare country, a ghoulish incarnation of a terrible legend, clad in flesh and bone and blood.

The creature was a giant ape, as tall on its gnarled legs as a gorilla. But the shaggy hair which covered it was of a strange ashy grey, longer and thicker than the hair on a gorilla. Its feet and hands were more man-like, the great toes and thumbs more like those of the human than of the anthropoid. It was no arboreal creature, but a beast bred on great plains and barren mountains. The face was gorilloid in general appearance, but the nose-bridge was more pronounced, the jaw less bestial, though there was no chin. But its man-like features merely served to increase the dreadfulness of its aspect, and the intelligence which gleamed from its small red eyes was wholly malignant.

Gordon knew it for what it was: the monster whose existence even he had refused to credit, the beast named in myth and legend of the north—the Snow-Ape, the Desert Man of forbidden Mongolia. He had heard rumours of its existence many times, in wild tales drifting down from a lost, bleak plateau-country of the Gobi never explored by white men. Tribesmen had sworn to the stories of a man-like beast which had dwelt there since time immemorial, adapted to the famine and bitter chill of the northern uplands. But Gordon had never seen a man who could prove he had seen one of the brutes.

But here was indisputable proof. How the nomads who served Othman had managed to bring the monster from Mongolia Gordon could not guess, but here was the djinn which haunted the ravines behind mysterious Shalizahr.

All this flashed through Gordon’s mind in the moment the two stood facing each other, man and beast, in menacing tenseness. Then the rocky walls of the ravine echoed to the ape’s deep sullen roar as it charged, low-hanging arms swinging wide, yellow fangs bared and dripping.

Gordon did not shout to his companion. Lal Singh was unarmed. Nor did he try to flee. He waited, poised on the balls of his feet, craft and long knife pitted against the brute strength of the mighty ape.

The monster’s victims had been given to it broken and shattered from the torture that only an Oriental knows how to inflict. The semi-human spark in its brain which set it apart from the true beasts had found a horrible exultation in the death agonies of its prey. This man was only another weak creature to be torn and twisted and dismembered, even though he stood upright and held a gleaming thing in his hand.

Gordon, as he faced that onrushing death, knew his only chance was to keep out of the grip of those huge arms which could crush him in an instant. The monster was clumsy but swift, as it rolled over the ground, and it hurled itself through the air for the last few feet in a giant grotesque spring. Not until it was looming over him, the great arms closing upon him, did Gordon move, and then his shift would have shamed a striking catamount.

The talon-like nails only shredded his shirt as he sprang clear, slashing as he sprang, and a hideous scream ripped the echoes shuddering through the ridges; the ape’s arm fell to the ground, shorn away at the elbow. With blood spouting from the severed stump the brute whirled and rushed again, and this time its desperate lunge was too lightning-quick for any human thews wholly to avoid.

Gordon evaded the disembowelling sweep of the great misshapen hand with its thick black nails, but the massive shoulder struck him and knocked him staggering. He was carried to the wall with the lunging brute, but even as he was swept backward he drove his knife to the hilt in the great belly and ripped up in the desperation of what he believed was his dying stroke.

They crashed together into the wall, and the ape’s great arm hooked terribly about Gordon’s straining frame; the roar of the beast deafened him as the foaming jaws gaped above his head—then they snapped spasmodically in empty air as a great shudder shook the mighty body. A frightful convulsion hurled the American clear, and he bounded up to see the ape thrashing in its death throes at the foot of the wall. His desperate upward rip had disembowelled it and the tearing blade had ploughed up through muscle and bone to find the fierce heart of the anthropoid.

Gordon’s corded thews were quivering as if from a long-sustained strain. His iron-hard frame had resisted the terrible strength of the ape long enough to permit him to come alive out of that awful grapple that would have torn a weaker man to pieces; but the terrific exertion had shaken even him. Shirt and undershirt had been ripped from him and those horny-taloned fingers had left bloody marks deep-grooved across his back. He was smeared and stained with blood, his own and the ape’s.

“El Borak! El Borak!” It was Lal Singh’s voice lifted in frenzy, and the Sikh burst out of the left-hand ravine, a rock in each hand, and his bearded face livid.

His eyes blazed at the sight of the ghastly thing at the foot of the wall; then he had seized Gordon in a desperate grasp.

“Sahib! Are you slain? You are covered with blood! Where are your wounds?”

“In the ape’s belly,” grunted Gordon, twisting free. Emotional display embarrassed him. “It’s his blood, not mine.”

Lal Singh sighed with gusty relief, and turned to stare wide-eyed at the dead monster.

“What a blow! You ripped him wide open so his guts fell out! Not ten men now alive in the world could strike such a blow. It is the djinn of which the girl warned us! And an ape! The beast the Mongols call the Desert Man.”

“Yes. I never believed the tales about them before. Scientific expeditions have tried to find them, but the natives in that part of the Gobi always ran the white men out.”

“Perhaps there are others,” suggested Lal Singh, peering sharply about in the gathering dusk. “It will soon be dark. It will not be well to meet such a fiend in these dark ravines after nightfall.”

“I don’t think. His roars could have been heard all through these gulches. If there had been another, it would have come to his aid, or sounded an answering roar, at least.”

“I heard the bellowing,” said Lai Singh fervently. “The sound turned my blood to ice, for I believed it was in truth a djinn such as the superstitious Moslems speak of. I did not expect to find you alive.”

Gordon spat, aware of thirst.

“Well, let’s get moving. We’ve rid the ravines of their haunter, but we can still die of hunger and thirst if we don’t get out. Come on.”

Dusk masked the gullies and hung over the ridges, as they moved off down the right-hand ravine. Forty yards further on the left-hand branch ran back into its brother, as Gordon had believed to be the case. As they advanced, the walls were more thickly pitted with cave-like lairs, in which the rank scent of the ape hung strong. Gordon scowled and Lal Singh swore at the numbers of skeletons which littered the gulch, which evidently had been the monster’s favourite stamping ground. Most of them were of women, and as Gordon viewed those pitiful remnants, a relentless and merciless rage grew redly in his brain. All that was violent in his nature ordinarily held under iron control, was roused to ferocious wakefulness by the realization of the horror and agony those helpless women had suffered, and in his own soul he sealed the doom of Shalizahr and the human fiends who ruled it. It was not his nature to swear oaths or vow loud vows. He did not speak his mind even to Lai Singh; but his intention to wipe out that nest of vultures in the interests of the world at large took on the tinge of a personal blood-feud, and his determination fixed like iron never to leave the plateau until he had looked down upon the dead bodies of Ivan Konaszevski and the Shaykh Al Jebal.

The loom of the mountain was now above them, in tiers of giant cliffs, rising precipitously above the rim of the bowl which enclosed the sunken labyrinth. The ravine they were following ran into a cleft in the wall of this bowl, beneath the mountain. It became a tunnel-like cavern, receding under the mountain like a well of blackness. There was despair in the Sikh’s voice as he spoke.

“Sahib, it is a prison from which there is no escape. We cannot climb the rim that hems in this depression of gulches. And this cave—”

“Wait!” Gordon’s iron fingers bit into the Sikh’s arm in sudden excitement. They were standing in utter darkness, some yards inside the cave-mouth. He had glimpsed something far down that black tunnel—something that shone like a firefly. But it was steady, not intermittent. It cut through the blackness like a stationary spark of light.

“Come on!” Releasing the Sikh’s arm Gordon hurried down the cavern, chancing a plunge into a pit or a meeting in the dark with some grim denizen of the underworld. He knew what he saw was a star, shining through some cleft in the mountain wall.

As they advanced a faint light illumined the darkness ahead of them, and presently they saw the cave ended at a blank wall; but in that wall, some ten feet from the floor, there was a hole and through it they saw the star and a bit of velvet night-sky. Without a word the Sikh bent his back, gripping his legs above the knees to brace himself, and Gordon climbed onto his shoulders and stood upright, his fingers grasping the rim of the roughly circular cleft. It was four or five feet long, and just big enough for a man to squeeze through. The ape might conceivably have reached it, but he could not have forced his great shoulders through it. Gordon did not believe the masters of Shalizahr knew of that opening.

He wriggled to the other end of the tunnel-like cleft, and peered over the rim. He was looking down on the western flank of the mountain. The hole was a crevice in a cliff which sloped down for three hundred feet, broken by rocks and ledges. He could not see the plateau; a marching row of broken pinnacles rose gauntly between it and his point of vantage. Crawling back he dropped down inside the cave beside the eager Sikh.

“Is it a way of escape, sahib?”

“For you. Lal Singh, you’ve got to go and meet Yar Ali Khan and the Ghilzai. I’m gambling on the chance that he reached Khor and will be back at the outer gates of Shalizahr by sunrise tomorrow. According to my estimate there are at least five hundred fighting men in Shalizahr. Baber Khan’s three hundred can’t take the city in a direct attack. They might surprise the guard at the cleft as I did, might even force their way up the Stair. But to cross the plateau on foot, in the teeth of five hundred rifles under Ivan’s command, would be suicide.”

“You’ve got to meet them before they get to the plateau. I think you can do it. When you’ve squirmed through this hole and climbed down the slope outside, you’ll be outside the ring of crags which surrounds Shalizahr. The only way through those crags is by the cleft through which we came to the plateau. The Ghilzai will come through that cleft. You’ll have to stop them in the canyon the Assassins call the Gorge of the Kings, if at all. To get there you’ll have to skirt the ring of crags and follow around their western slopes until you hit the canyon. It’ll be rough going, and you may have trouble getting down the cliffs that wall the canyon when you get there. But you’ll have all night to make the trip in.”

“And you, sahib?”

“I’m coming to that. If you get to the gorge of the Kings before the Ghilzai come, hide and wait for them. If they’ve already passed through the cleft—you can read their sign—follow them as fast as you can. In any event, see that Baber Khan follows this plan of action: let him take fifty men and make a demonstration against the Stair. If they can climb the ramps and take cover in the boulders at the head of the Stair, so much the better. If not, let them climb the surrounding crags and start shooting at everything in sight on the plateau. The idea is to create a diversion to attract the attention of the men in the city, and if possible to draw them all to the Stair. If they advance down into the canyon, let Baber Khan and his fifty retreat among the crags.

“Meanwhile, do you and Yar Ali Khan lead the rest of the Ghilzai back the way you’ll traverse in reaching the Gorge of Kings. Bring them up that slope and through this cleft and down that ravine where the door in the rock opens into the dungeons under the palace.”

“But what of you?”

“My part will be to open that door for you—from the inside.”

“But this is madness! You cannot get back into the city; and if you did, they would flay you alive. But you cannot open that door.”

“Another will open it for me. That ape didn’t eat the wretches thrown to him. He wasn’t carnivorous. No ape is. He had to be fed vegetables, or nuts, or roots or something. You saw a man open that door and throw something out. Undoubtedly it was a bundle of food. They fed it through that door, and they must have fed it regularly. It wasn’t gaunt, by any means.

“I’m gambling that door will be opened tonight. When it opens, I’m going through it. I’ve got to. They’ve got Azizun somewhere in that hellish palace, and only Allah knows what they’re doing to her. Now you go in a hurry. When you get back into the bowl with the Ghilzai, hide them among the gulches and come down the ravine to the door with three or four men. Tap a few times on it with your rifle-butt. That door will be opened whether I’m alive or dead—if I have to come back from Hell and open it. Once in the palace, we’ll make a shambles of Othman and his dogs.”

The Sikh lifted his hand in protest and opened his mouth—then shrugged his shoulders fatalistically and silently acquiesced.

Gordon squatted and the Sikh climbed on his shoulders and stood upright, steadying himself with outstretched hands against the wall. Gordon gripped his ankles with both hands and rose to an upright posture without the aid of his arms, using only his leg muscles to lift himself and the tall man on his shoulders—a feat impossible to most men besides trained acrobats.

In the cleft Lal Singh turned and looked down at his friend.

“What if none comes with food for the beast, and the door is not opened tonight?”

“Then I’ll cut off the ape’s head and throw it over the wall. They’ll open the door then, to see why I’m still alive. Maybe they’ll take me into the palace to torture me when they learn I’ve killed their goblin. Once let me get in there, even if in chains, and I’ll find a way to trick them.

“Here!” Gordon tossed up the long knife. “You may need this.”

“But if you wish to cut off the ape’s head—”

“I’ll saw it off with a sliver of sharp rock—or gnaw it off with my teeth! Get going, confound it!”

“The gods protect you,” muttered the Sikh, and vanished. Gordon heard a clawing and scrambling that marked his course through the cleft, and then pebbles began rattling down the sloping cliff outside.

Chapter Seven

Death Stalks the Palace

Gordon groped his way back through the cavern, and when he came into the comparative light of the gulches, he ran, fleetly and sure-footedly, until he came into the outer ravine and saw the wall and the cliff and the shelf of rock at the other end. The lights of Shalizahr glowed in the sky above the wall, and he could catch the weird melody of whining native citherns. A woman’s voice was lifted in a plaintive song. He smiled grimly at the dark, skeleton-littered gorges about him. So might the lords of Nineveh and Babylon and Susa have revelled, heedless of the captives screaming and writhing and dying in the pits beneath their palaces—ignorant of the red destruction predestined at the maddened hands of those captives.

There was no food on the rocky shelf before the door. He had no way of knowing how often the brute had been fed; and whether it would be fed that night. That it had not been fed he could see, and he believed that food would be put out for it soon. Many hours had elapsed since the Sikh had seen that door opened.

He must gamble with chance, as he so often had. The thought of what might even then be happening to the girl Azizun made him sweat with fear for her, and maddened him with impatience. But he flattened himself against the rock on the side against which he knew the door opened, and waited. In his youth he had learned the patience of the red Indian which trandscends even the patience of the East. For an hour he stood there, scarcely moving a muscle. A statue could hardly have stood more immobily.

Even his patience was wearing thin when without warning there came a rattle of chains, and the door opened a crack. Someone was peering out, to be sure the grisly guardian of the gorges was not near, before the door was fully opened. More bolts clanged and a Tajik stepped out of the opening door. He bore a great iron platter of vegetables and nuts, and he sounded a weird call as he set it down. And as he bent Gordon struck a hammer-like blow to the back of his neck. The Tajik went down without a sound and lay still, head lolling on a broken neck.

That blow with a clenched fist had been without warning, but mercy was wasted on any rogue of Shalizahr. Gordon peered through the open door and saw that the corridor, lighted by the bronze lamps, was empty; the barred cells stood vacant. Hurriedly he dragged the Tajik down the ravine and concealed the body among some broken rocks, appropriating the dagger the man wore.

Then he returned and entered the corridor. He shut the door and hesitated over shooting the bolts. He finally decided to do so, because someone would be sure to pass that way before the night was over, and suspicion would be aroused and the door bolted anyway. Dagger in hand he started toward the secret door that opened into the tunnel which led to the hidden stair. His plan was clear in his mind. He meant to find Azizun if she were still alive, bring her with him to the tunnel and hide there until Lal Singh led his warriors up the ravine. Then he would open the door, and lead them against the men of Shalizahr, and the outcome thereafter would be as Allah willed and cold steel decided.

Or if hiding in the tunnel was not feasible, he might barricade himself and the girl in the corridor and hold it until the Ghilzai came. He was acting and planning all along as if their coming was a certainty. Of course there was always the chance that they would not come; that Yar Ali Khan had been unable to get through to Khor. But Gordon was nothing if not a gambler. And he was staking his life on the chance that the Afridi had gotten through.

The secret door was in the left wall, near the end of the passage, where there was another door, undisguised. He had not reached his objective when this door opened suddenly and a man stepped into the corridor. It was an Arab and as he sighted Gordon his breath hissed between his teeth and he reached for a heavy revolver which hung at his thigh.

But Gordon’s hand darted back with the dagger, poised for a throw. The Arab froze; pallor tinging his skin under his black beard. He had no illusions about the situation with which he found himself confronted. His hand gripped the pistol butt, but he knew that before he could draw and fire that dagger would flash through the air and transfix him, hurled by an arm whose force and accuracy was famed throughout the Hills. Gingerly he spread his fingers wide, drew his hand away from the gun, and lifted both arms in token of surrender.

With a stride Gordon reached him, jerked the pistol from its scabbard and jammed the muzzle in the Arab’s belly.

“Where is the Indian girl, Azizun?”

“In a dungeon beyond the door through which I just came.”

“Are there other guards?”

“Nay, by Allah! I am the only one.”

“All right. Turn around and march back through that door. Don’t try any tricks.”

“Allah forbid!”

The man pushed open the door with his foot and stepped through, moving as carefully as if treading on the edges of naked razors. They came into another corridor which turned sharply to the left, disclosing rows of cells on each side, apparently empty.

“She is in the last cell on the right,” the Arab murmured, and then grunted convulsively an instant later as they halted before the barred door. The cell was empty. There was another door in that cell, opposite the one before which they stood, and that door stood open.

“You lied to me,” said Gordon softly, jamming the gun-muzzle savagely into the Arab’s back. “I’ll kill you!”

“Allah be my witness!” panted the man, shaking with terror. “She was here.”

“They have taken her away,” spoke an unexpected voice. Gordon wheeled, wrenching the Arab around with him so the man stood between him and the direction from which the voice came, with the American’s gun trained over his shoulder.

Bearded faces crowded the grille of the opposite cell. Lean hands gripped the bars. Gordon recognized the prisoners. They glared silently at him with poisonous hate burning in their eyes.

Gordon stepped toward the door, dragging his prisoner.

“You were faithful fedauis,” he commented. “Why are you locked in a cell?”

Yusuf ibn Suleiman spat toward him.

“Because of you, Melikani dog! You surprised us on the Stair, and the Shaykh sentenced us to die, even before he learned you were a spy. He said we were either knaves or fools to be caught off guard as you caught us, so at dawn we die under the knives of Muhammad ibn Ahmed’s slayers, may Allah curse him and you!”

“Yet you will attain Paradise,” he reminded them, “because you have faithfully served the Shaykh Al Jebal.”

“May the dogs gnaw the bones of the Shaykh Al Jebal,” they replied with whole-hearted venom. “Wouldst that thou and the Shaykh were chained together in Hell!”

Gordon reflected that Othman had fallen far short of obtaining such allegiance as was boasted by his ancestors, for whom their followers gladly slew themselves at command.

He had taken a bunch of keys from the girdle of the guard, and now he weighed them contemplatively in his hand. The eyes of the Kurds fixed upon them with the aspect of men in Hell who look upon an open door.

“Yusuf ibn Suleiman,” he said abruptly, “your hands are stained with many crimes. But the violation of a sworn oath is not among them. The Shaykh has abandoned you—cast you from his service. You are no longer his men, you Kurds. You owe him no allegiance.”

Yusuf’s eyes were those of a wolf.

“Could I but send him to Jehannum ahead of me,” he muttered, “I’d die happy.”

All stared tensely at Gordon, sensing a purpose behind his words.

“Will you swear, each man by the honour of his clan, to follow me and serve me until vengeance is accomplished, or death releases you from the vow?” he asked, placing the keys behind him so as not to seem to be flaunting them too flagrantly before helpless men. “Othman will give you nothing but the death of a dog. I offer you revenge and an opportunity to die honourably.”

Yusuf’s eyes blazed in response to a wild surge of hope, and his sinewy hands quivered as they grasped the bars.

“Trust us!” was all he said, but it spoke volumes.

“Aye, we swear!” clamored the men behind him. “Hearken, El Borak, we swear, each of us by the honour of his clan!”

He was turning the key in the lock before they finished swearing; wild, cruel, turbulent, treacherous according to western standard, they had their code of honour, those fierce mountaineers, and it was not so far different from the code of his own Highland ancestors that he did not understand it.

Tumbling out of the cell they instantly laid hold of the Arab, shouting: “Slay him! He is one of Muhammad ibn Ahmed’s dogs!”

Gordon tore the man from their grasp, handling the attackers ruthlessly; he dealt the most persistent a buffet that stretched him on the floor, but did not seem to arouse any particular resentment in his savage bosom.

“Have done! Are you men or wolves?”

He thrust the cowering Arab before him down the corridor and back into the passage which opened on the ravine, followed by the Kurds who, having sworn their allegiance, followed blindly and asked no questions. Back in the other corridor, Gordon ordered the Arab to strip, and the man did, shivering in fear of instant death, and fearful that the command indicated torture.

“Change clothes with him,” was Gordon’s next command, directed at Yusuf ibn Suleiman, and the fierce Kurd obeyed without a word. Then at Gordon’s direction, the others bound and gagged the Arab and thrust him through the secret door, which Gordon opened, and into the tunnel.

Yusuf ibn Suleiman stood up in the plumed helmet, striped khalat and baggy silk trousers of the Arab, and his features were sufficiently Semitic to fool anyone who was expecting to see an Arab in that garb.

“I am placing upon you the trust of a great responsibility,” said Gordon abruptly. “It is the due of a brave man. Some time, it may be by dawn, and it may be by another nightfall, or even another dawn, men will come and knock on that bolted door which opens upon the ravine of the djinn. They will be Ghilzai riflemen, led by Lal Singh and Yar Ali Khan. This is your part: to hide in this tunnel and open the door when they come. You have the Arab’s scimitar; when another guard comes to relieve the one who lies bound there, kill him and hide his body. If yet another comes before Lal Singh, slay him likewise. They will not know you from one of their comrades until you strike.”

From the way the Kurd’s eyes blazed, Gordon knew he would not fail in that part of the plot, at least.

“It may be no slaying will be necessary,” he qualified. “When the next guard comes, he will see that the prisoners have escaped, and he may not enter this corridor at all. If more than one man comes, hide in the tunnel. It may be we shall have returned before any comes. I take five men with me to look for the girl Azizun. If it is possible, I shall return here with her, and we will bolt the doors and hold this corridor against the men of Othman until Lal Singh comes. But if I do not return, I trust you to remain here, in hiding or holding the corridor by the edge of your sword, and open that door for my warriors when they come.”

“The Ghilzai will slay me when I open the door to them!”

“Before you open the door, call out to Lal Singh and say: ‘El Borak bids you remember the wolves of Jagai.’ He will know by that word that he can trust you. Where did the Ismailians take the girl?”

“Shortly after the Arab dog passed on his tour of the cells, men opened the door at the other end of her dungeon and dragged her away. They told her they were taking her to the Shaykh to be questioned by him: He will speak with her in the room where he first received you. But six men cannot fight their way through the twenty Persians which stand guard before the door.”

“Do you know the entrance to the garden of Paradise?”

“Aye!” A general nodding of heads showed him that Othman’s mysteries were certainly not such absolute enigmas as had been those of his ancestor, the location of whose mystic gardens not even his fedauis had known.

“Then lead me there.” And Gordon turned away, with his whole chance of success, and life itself, depending on the mere word of a savage who had been born and raised in the conviction that slaughter, rapine and treachery are the natural and proper attributes of a man’s life. There was nothing to keep Yusuf ibn Suleiman from hurrying to the Shaykh as soon as Gordon’s back was turned, to buy his life by betraying the American, and later arranging a trap for Lal Singh and the Ghilzai to walk into—nothing but the primitive honour of a man who knew he was trusted by another man of honour.

Gordon and his Kurds groped through the tunnel and up the stair. The chamber where he had slept was empty. But on the stair, just inside the masked panel he found the two swords where Lal Singh had left them when he charged, pistol in hand, to Gordon’s aid, forgetting the steel in his haste, and with them he armed two of his followers. The dagger he had taken from the Tajik went to another.

The corridor outside the chamber was empty. The Kurds took the lead there. With nightfall the atmosphere of silence and mystery had increased over the palace of the Shaykh Al Jebal. The lights burned more dimly; shadows hung thickly, and no breeze stole in to rustle the dully shimmering tapestries. Gordon’s boots made no more sound on the thick rugs than did the bare feet of the Kurds.

They knew the way well enough; a ragged and disreputable-looking gang, with furtive feet and blazing eyes, they stole swiftly along the dim, richly-adorned hallways, like a band of midnight thieves. They kept to passages little frequented at that time of night, and they had encountered no one, when passing through a cunningly masked door, they came suddenly to another door, gilded and barred, before which stood two giant black Sudanese with naked tulwars. Gordon had time to reflect that here was the main weakness of Othman’s reign; the entrance to Paradise was too accessible; its mystery not impressive enough.

The Sudanese knew these men were unauthorized invaders, however. They did not shout a warning as they lifted their tulwars; they were mutes. Gordon did not dare chance a shot, but his pistol was not needed. Eager to begin the work of vengeance, the Kurds swarmed on the two blacks, the two men with swords engaging them while the others grappled and dragged them down—stabbed them to death in a straining, sweating, swearing knot of convulsing effort and agony. It was butcher’s work, but it was a matter of grim necessity, and pity for those tongueless murderers was emotion wasted.

“Keep watch here at the door,” he commanded one of the Kurds, and then Gordon threw open the door and strode out into the garden, now empty in the starlight, its blossoms glimmering whitely, its dense trees and shrubbery masses of dusky mystery. The Kurds, now armed with the tulwars of the blacks, blooded and whetted to the adventure, followed him boldly, even swaggering, as if they were walking through a common garden, instead of one which until that day they had considered, if not, as Othman hoped, Paradise itself, at least its nearest earthly equivalent. They seemed to have just realized—their perceptions sharpened by the spilt blood—that they were following El Borak, whose renown already partook of the mythical in that land of blood and mystery.

Gordon headed straight for the balcony which he knew was there, cleverly masked by the branches of trees which grew beneath it. Three of the Kurds bent their backs for him to stand upon, and in an instant he had found the window from which he and Othman had looked, and had forced it with a dagger point. The next instant he was through it, making no more noise than a panther would have made effecting the same entry.

Sounds came to him from beyond the curtain that masked the balcony-alcove—a woman sobbing in pain or terror, and the voice of Othman.

Peering through the hangings he saw the Shaykh lolling on the throne under the pearl-sewn canopy. The guards no longer stood like ebon images on either side of him. They were imployed before the dais, in the middle of the floor-employed in whetting daggers and heating irons in small glowing braziers. Azizun was stretched out between them, naked, spread-eagled on the floor, her wrists and ankles lashed to pegs driven in the floor. No one else was in the room, and the bronze doors were closed and bolted.

“Tell me how the Sikh escaped from the cell,” commanded Othman.

“No! No!” gasped the girl, too terrified to withold her pitiful reason for silence. “El Borak might suffer were I to speak!“

“Little fool! El Borak is—”

“Here!” Gordon snapped as he stepped from the alcove. The Shaykh jerked about, went livid—shrieked and toppled from the throne, sprawling on the edge of the dais. The Sudanese straightened, snarling like beasts, whipping out knives. Gordon fired from the hip and one black spun on his heel and crumpled. The other sprang toward the girl, lifting his scimitar, intent on slaying their victim before he died. Gordon’s slug caught him in mid-spring, drilling him through the temples. He slumped down almost upon the girl. Outside men were yelling and hammering on the door.

The Shaykh sprang up, babbling incoherently. His eyes were almost starting from his head as he glared at the grim, blood-stained white man and the smoking gun in his hand.

“You are not real!” he shrieked, throwing out his hand as if to ward off a dreadful apparition. “You are a dream of the hashish! No, no! There is blood on the floor! You were dead—they told me you had been given to the ape! But you have come back to slay me! You are a fiend! A devil, as men say! Help! Help! Guard! To me! The devil El Borak has returned to slay and destroy!”

Screaming like a mad thing Othman plunged from the dais and ran toward the door. Gordon waited until the Persian’s fingers were clawing at the bolts; then coldly, remorselessly he ripped a bullet through the man’s body. The Shaykh staggered, whirled to face his enemy and fell back against the door, shrieking his fear, until his voice was silenced forever by a bullet that crashed through his mouth and blasted his brains.

Chapter Eight

Wolves at Bay

Gordon looked down at his victim with eyes as relentless as black iron. Beyond the door the clamor was growing, and out in the garden the Kurds were bawling to know if he were safe, and vociferously demanding permission to follow him into the palace. He shouted for them to be patient and hurriedly freed the girl, snatching up a piece of silk from a divan to wrap about her. She sobbed hysterically, clasping his neck in a frenzy mingled of fright and overpowering relief.

“Oh, sahib, I knew you would come! I knew you would not let them torture me! They told me you were dead, but I knew they could not kill you—”

Carrying her in his arms he strode through the balcony and handed her down through the window to the Kurds. She screamed when she saw their fierce bearded faces, but a word from Gordon soothed her, as he swung down beside her.

“And now, effendi?” the warriors demanded, eager to be at more desperate work, now that they were fully fired to the game at hand. Most of this zeal resulted from a growing admiration for their leader; such men as Gordon have led hopeless armies chanting to snatch impossible victories out of the jaws of defeat.

“Back the way we came, to the tunnel where Yusuf waits.”

They started at a run across the garden, Gordon carrying the girl as if she had been a child. They had not gone forty feet when ahead of them a clang of steel vied with the din in the palace behind them. Lusty curses mingled with the clangor, a door slammed like a clap of thunder, and a figure came headlong through the shrubbery. It was the Kurd they had left on guard at the gilded door. He was swearing like a pirate and wringing blood drops from a slashed forearm. “A score of Arab dogs are at the door!” he yelled. “Some one saw us kill the Sudanese, and ran for Muhammad ibn Ahmed! I sworded one in the belly and slammed the door in their accursed faces, but they’ll have it down in a few minutes!”

“Is there a way out of this garden that does not lead through the palace, Azizun?” asked Gordon.

“This way!”He set her down and she seized his hand and scurried toward the north wall, all but hidden in masses of foliage. Across the garden they could hear the gilded door splintering under the onslaught of the desert men, and Azizun started convulsively at each blow as if it had impacted on her tender flesh. Panting with fright and excitement she tore at the fronds, pulling and pushing them aside until she disclosed a cunningly masked door set in the wall. Gordon had two cartridges left in the big pistol. He used one in blowing the antique lock apart. They burst through into another, smaller garden, lit with hanging lanterns, just as the gilded door gave way and a stream of wild figures with waving blades flooded into the Garden of the Houris.

In the midst of the garden into which the fugitives had come stood the slim minaret-like tower Gordon had noticed when he first entered the palace.

“That tower!” he snapped, slamming the door behind them and wedging it with a dagger—that might hold it for a few seconds, at least. “If we can get in there—”

“The Shaykh often sat in the upper chamber, watching the mountains with a telescope,” panted a Kurd. “He allowed none other but Bagheela in that upper chamber, but men say rifles are stored there. Arab guards sleep in the lower chamber—”

But there was nothing else for it. The Arabs had almost reached the door behind them, and from the racket that was being kicked up in every other direction, it would only be a matter of minutes before men would be swarming into the Garden of the Tower from every gate that opened into it. Gordon led his men in a run straight toward the tower, the door of which opened as five bewildered guards came out seeking the cause for the unwonted disturbance. They yelped in astonishment as they saw a knot of men racing toward them, teeth bared, eyes blazing in the light of the hanging lanterns, blades flashing. The guards, shaking the cobwebs of sleep from their brains, went into action just a second too late.

Gordon shot one and brained another with his gun butt an instant after the Arab had drilled one of the Kurds through the heart. The other Kurds swarmed over the three remaining Arabs, glutting ancient tribal hates in a wild burst of blood-letting, slashing and hacking and stabbing until the gay-clad figures lay still in a puddle of crimson.

Vengeful yells reached a crescendo behind them and the dagger-wedged door splintered inward, and the aperture was crowded with wild faces and waving arms as Muhammad’s men jammed there in their frantic eagerness to reach their prey. Gordon caught up a rifle an Arab had dropped and poured a stream of lead into that close-packed mass. At a hundred yards it was slaughter. One instant the gate was crowded with furious straining bodies, the next it was a shambles of gory, writhing, shrieking figures from which the living gave back aghast.

The Kurds howled deliriously and stormed into the tower—wheeled about to meet a charge of maddened Druses who had stolen unnoticed into the garden through another gate and rushed into the doorway before the door could be closed. For a few seconds the open doorway was a hell of whickering steel and spurting blood, in which Gordon did his part with a rifle butt, and then the Druses staggered dazedly away, leaving three of their number lying in their blood before the door, while another hitched himself away on his elbow, blood spurting from severed arteries.

Gordon slammed the bronze door, and shot home a bolt that would have held against the charge of an elephant.

“Up the stairs! Quick! Get the guns!”

They rushed up, eyes and teeth gleaming, all but one who collapsed half-way up from loss of blood. Gordon half-dragged, half-carried him the rest of the way, laid him on the floor and ordered Azizun to bandage the ghastly gash made by a Druse sabre, before he turned to take stock of their surroundings. They were in the upper chamber of the tower, which had no windows; but the walls were pierced with loop-holes of varying sizes and at every conceivable angle, some slanting downward, and all furnished with sliding iron covers. The Kurds chanted gleefully as they snatched the modern rifles which lined the walls in racks from which hung bandoliers of cartridges. Othman had prepared his aerie for defence as well as for observation.

Every man was wounded more or less badly, but they all swarmed to the loop-holes and began firing gleefully down into the mob which surged about the door. These had come from every direction, while the besieged party was climbing the stair. Muhammad ibn Ahmed was not visible, but a hundred or so of his Arabs were, and a welter of men of a dozen other races. They swarmed the garden, yelling like fiends. The lanterns, swinging wildly under the impact of stumbling bodies against the slender trees, illuminated a mass of contorted faces, white eyeballs rolling madly upward. Blades flickered lightning-like all over the garden and rifles were discharged blindly. Bushes and shrubs were shredded underfoot as the mob milled and eddied. They had obtained a beam from somewhere and were using it as a ram against the door.

Gordon was surprized at the celerity with which he and his party had been pursued and trapped, until he heard Ivan Konaszevski’s voice lifted like the slash of a sabre above the clamor. The Cossack must have learned of Othman’s death within a matter of minutes after it had occurred, and taken instant charge. His instant understanding of the situation, coupled with the chance that had caused Muhammad ibn Ahmed to block their escape, had undone the fugitives.

But if they were trapped they were not helpless. Yelping joyously the Kurds poured lead through the loop-holes. Even the sabered man, his bleeding stanched by a crude bandage, crawled to a loop-hole, propped himself on a divan and began firing wastefully down on his former associates. There was no missing at that range, and the leaden blasts tore lanes through the close-packed mob. Not even Ismailians could endure such slaughter. The throng broke in all directions, scattering for cover, and the Kurds whooped with frantic glee and dropped the fugitives as they ran.

In a few moments the garden was empty except for the dead and dying, and a storm of lead came whistling back from the walls and the windows of the palace which over­looked the Garden of the Tower, and from the roofs of houses that stood near the wall, outside in the square.

Lead flattened against the walls with a vicious spat! like a hornet smashing itself against a window in full flight. The tower was of stone, braced with bronze and iron. Bullets from outside seldom found an open loop-hole. Gordon did not believe it could be taken by storm, as long as their ammunition held out, and there were thousands of rounds in the upper chamber. But they had neither food nor water. The man who had been slashed with the saber was tortured by thirst, particularly, but, with the stoicism of his race, he made no complaint but lay silently chewing a bullet.

Gordon took stock of their position, looking through the loop-holes. The palace, as he knew, stood surrounded by gardens, except in the front where there was a wide court­yard. All was enclosed by an outer wall, and lower, inner walls separated the gardens, somewhat like the spokes of a wheel, with the higher outer wall taking the place of the rim. The garden in which they were at bay lay on the north-west side of the palace, next to the courtyard, which was separated from it by a wall; another wall lay between it and the next garden to the west; both this garden and the Garden of the Tower lay outside the Garden of the Houris, which was half-enclosed by the walls of the palace itself. The courtyard wall connected with the wall of the Garden of the Houris, so that the Garden of the Tower was completely enclosed.

The north wall was the barrier which surrounded the whole of the palace grounds, and beyond it he looked down on the lighted roofs of the city. The nearest house was not over a hundred feet from the wall. Lights had been extinguished in it and in the other houses nearby, and men were crouching behind the parapets, sniping at the tower in the blind hope of hitting something besides stone. Lights blazed in all the palace windows, but the court and most of the adjoining gardens were dark.

Only in the besieged garden did the lighted lanterns still hang. It seemed strange and unreal, that lighted garden with the tower in the midst, deserted except for the sprawling bodies of the dead, while on all sides lurked unseen but vengeful multitudes.

The volleys ripping from all sides reflected a touch of panic, and the Kurds cursed venomously because they could see nothing to shoot back at. But suddenly there came a lull in the bombardment, and the men inside the tower likewise ceased firing, without orders. In the tense silence that followed Ivan Konaszevski’s voice was raised from behind the courtyard wall.

“Are you ready to surrender, Gordon?”

Gordon laughed at him.

“Come and get us!”

“That’s just what I intend to do—at dawn!” the Cossack assured him. “You are as good as a dead man now!”

“That’s what you said when you left me in the ravine of the djinn,” Gordon retorted. “But I’m still alive—and the djinnis dead!”

He had spoken in Arabic, and a shout of anger and unbelief rose from all quarters. The Kurds, who had not asked Gordon a single question about his escape from the labyrinth of the ape, slapped their rifle stocks and nodded at each other as much as to say that slaying djinni was no more than was to be expected from El Borak.

“Do the Assassins know that the Shaykh is dead, Ivan?” called Gordon satirically.

“They know that Ivan Konaszevski is the real ruler of Shalizahr, as he has always been!” was the wrathful reply. “I don’t know how you killed the ape, or how you got those Kurdish dogs out of their cell, but I do know that I’ll have all your skins hanging on this wall before the sun is an hour high!”

“Kurdish dogs!” murmured the mountain warriors, caressing their rifles vengefully. “Ha! Wallah!”

But Gordon smiled, for he knew that if Yusuf ibn Suleiman had been captured, Ivan would have taunted them with the news. Gordon did not believe that any extended investigations of the dungeons had been, or would be made. All the attention of the Assassins was concentrated on the tower, and there was no point in their exploring the cells at the present. Gordon felt that he was justified in believing that Yusuf was still safe in the tunnel below the palace, waiting to let in Lal Singh and the Ghilzais.

Presently a banging and hammering sounded somewhere on the other side of the courtyard, which was not visible from the tower, and Konaszevski yelled vengefully: “Do you hear that, you American swine? Did you ever hear of a storming belfroi? Well, that’s what my men are building—a mantlet on wheels that will stop bullets and protect fifty men behind it. As soon as it’s daylight we’re going to push it up to the tower and batter down the door: That will be your finish, you dog!”

“And yours,” retorted Gordon. “You can’t storm this tower without exposing yourself at least a little; and a little is all I’ll need, you Russian wolfhound!”

The Cossack’s answer was a shout of derisive laughter that was not convincing because it shook with fury, and thereafter there was no more parleying. Men still fired from the garden walls and the roofs outside, not hoping to hit anything, but evidently intending to discourage any attempt to escape from the tower. Gordon did consider such a break; they could shoot out the lanterns which lighted the garden and make the try in the darkness—but he abandoned the idea. Men clustered thickly behind every wall that hemmed the garden in. Such an attempt would be suicide. The fortress had become a prison.

Gordon frankly admitted to himself that this was one jam out of which he could not get himself by his own efforts. If the Ghilzais did not show up on schedule, he and his party were finished; and it gave him a twinge to think of Yusuf ibn Suleiman waiting for days, perhaps, in the corridors under the palace, until hunger drove him into the hands of his enemies, or down the ravine to escape. Then Gordon remembered that he had not told the Kurd how to reach the exit at the other end of the labyrinth.

The hammering and pounding went on in the unseen section of the court. Even if the Ghilzais came at sunrise they might be too late. He reflected that the Ismailians would have to break down a long section of the wall to get such a machine as Ivan had described into the garden. But that would not take long.

The Kurds did not share their leader’s apprehensions. They had already wrought a glorious slaughter; they had a strong position; a leader they already worshipped as men used to worship kings; good rifles and plenty of ammunition. What more could a mountain warrior desire? They hugged their rifles and boasted vaingloriously to each other and fired at everything that moved, letting the future take care of itself. So through the long hours the strange fight went on, the cracking of the rifles punctuated by the din of the hammers in the torch-lit court.

The Kurd with the sword-cut died just as dawn was paling the lanterns in the garden below. Gordon covered the dead man with a rug and stared haggardly at his pitiful band. The three Kurds knelt at the loop-holes, looking like blood­stained ghouls in the ghostly grey light. Azizun was sleeping in utter exhaustion on the floor, her cheek pillowed on a childishly soft round arm.

The hammering had ceased and in the stillness he heard a creaking of massive wheels. He knew that the juggernaut the Ismailians had built during the night was being rolled across the courtyard, but he could not yet see it. He could make out the black forms of men huddled on the roofs of the houses beyond the outer wall. He looked further, over the roofs and clustering trees, toward the northern edge of the plateau. He saw no sign of life, in the growing light, among the boulders that lined the rim of the cliffs. Evidently the guards, undeterred by the fate of Yusuf and the other original sentries, had deserted their post to join the fighting at the palace. No Oriental ruler was ever able to command absolute obedience from all his men. But as he watched Gordon saw a group of a dozen or so men trudging along the road that led to the Stair. Konaszevski would not long leave that point unguarded, and Gordon could guess what would be the fate of the men who had deserted it.

He turned back toward his three Kurds who were looking at him silently, bearded faces turned toward him. He looked like the wildest barbarian that ever trod a battlefield, naked to the waist, his boots and breeches smeared with blood, his bronzed breast and shoulders scratched, and stained with powder smoke.

“The Ghilzais have not come,” he said abruptly. “Presently Konaszevski will send his slayers against us under cover of a great shield built on wheels. They will break down the door with a ram. We will slay some of them as they come up the stair. Then we will die.”

“Allah ilallah!” they answered by way of agreement and acceptance of their Kismet. “We shall slay many before we die!” And they grinned like hungry wolves in the dawn and thumbed the bolts of their rifles.

Outside, from every wall and window guns began to crack and bullets spattered thick about the loop-holes. The men in the tower could see the storming-machine now, rumbling ponderously across the courtyard. It was a massive affair of beams and brass and iron, on ox-wagon wheels, with an iron-headed ram projecting from an aperture in the centre. At least fifty men could huddle behind and beneath it, safe from rifle-fire.

It rolled toward the wall and came to a halt, and sledge hammers began to crash on the wall.

All the noise had awakened Azizun who sat up rubbing her eyes, stared bewilderedly about her, and then cried out and ran to Gordon to cling to him and be comforted. Little of comfort he could offer her from his great store of pity for her. There was nothing now he could do for her, except to interpose his body between hers and their enemies in the last charge, and mercifully save his last bullet for her.

Sensing the desperation of their position she lay like a child in his arms, her face hidden against his broad breast, moaning faintly. Gordon sat quietly, waiting the last grapple with the patience of the wild in which he had spent so much of his life, and his expression was composed, almost tranquil, though his eyes blazed unquenchably.

“The wall crumbles,” muttered a lynx-eyed Kurd crouching over his rifle at a loop-hole. “Dust rises under the hammers. Soon we will be able to see the workmen who swing the sledges on the other side of that wall. Then—”

“Listen!”

All in the tower heard it, but it was Azizun who started up and cried out as a new sound cut the medley to which they had become accustomed. It was a burst of firing off toward the north, and at the sound every rifle in Shalizahr was still suddenly.

Chapter Nine

The Red Orchard

Gordon sprang to a loop-hole on the north side of the tower. He looked over the roofs of Shalizahr toward the road that stretched out in the still white dawn. Half a dozen men were running along that road, firing backward as they ran. Behind them other figures were swarming out of the rocks that clustered the rim of the plateau.

These figures, miniature in the distance but distinctly etched in the early light, levelled rifles. Shots cracked, a cloud of smoke puffed out, and the fleeing figures stumbled and fell sprawling. A fierce deep yelling came to the ears listening in the suddenly noiseless city.

“Baber Khan!” ejaculated Gordon. Again the negligence of the Stair guards had aided him. The Ghilzais had climbed the unguarded Stair in time to slaughter the sentries coming to mount guard there. But he was aghast at the numbers which were swarming up on the plateau. When the stream of men ceased there were at least three hundred warriors pouring up the road toward Shalizahr. There was but one explanation: Lal Singh had not met them with his plan of attack. Gordon could visualize the scene that must have taken place when they reached the appointed rendezvous and found El Borak not there—the berserk rage of Yar Ali Khan and the vengeful fury that would send the tribesmen recklessly up the Stair to make a direct onslaught on the city of which they knew nothing, save that it held enemies they thought had slain their friend. What had happened to Lal Singh he could not even guess.

In Shalizahr frozen amazement had given way to hasty action. Men were yelling on the roofs, running about in the street. From house-top to house-top the news of the invasion sped like wind, and in a few minutes men were shouting it in the palace courtyard. Gordon knew that Ivan would mount to some vantage point in the dome and see for himself, and he was not surprised, a few moments later, to hear the Cossack’s whip-lash voice shouting orders. The hammering on the wall ceased. Men scurried out from behind the moving shield.

A few moments later men were pouring into the square from the gardens and court, and from the houses that flanked the square. The Kurds in the tower fired valiantly at them and scored some hits, but these were ignored. Gordon watched for Ivan but knew the Cossack would leave the palace at some exit not exposed to the fire from the tower. Presently he glimpsed him far down the street, amidst a glittering company of corseleted Arabs, at the head of which gleamed the plumed helmet of Muhammad ibn Ahmed. After them thronged hundreds of Ismailian warriors, well-armed, and in good marching order, for tribesmen. Evidently Ivan had taught them at least the rudiments of civilized warfare.

They swung along as if they intended to march out onto the plain and meet the oncoming horde in open battle, but at the end of the street they scattered suddenly, taking cover in the gardens and the houses on each side of the street.

The Afghans were still too far away to be able to see what was going on in the city. By the time they had reached a point where they could look down the street it seemed empty and deserted. But Gordon, from his vantage point high above the houses, could see the gardens at the northern end of the town clustered with menacing figures, the roofs loaded with men whose rifles glinted in the morning light. The Afghans were marching into a trap, while he stood there helpless. Gordon felt as if he were strangling.

A Kurd came and stood beside Gordon, knotting a rude bandage about a wounded wrist. He spoke through his teeth, with which he was tugging at the rag.

“Are those your friends? They are fools. They run head­long into the fangs of death. ”

“I know!” Gordon’s knuckles showed white on his clenched fists.

“I know exactly what will happen,” said the Kurd. “When I was a palace guardsman I have heard Bagheela tell his officers his plan of defence, in case an enemy ever attacked the city.

“Do you see that orchard at the end of the street, on the east side? Fifty men with rifles hide there. You can glimpse the gleam of their barrels among the peach blossoms. Across the road is a garden we call the Garden of the Egyptian. There too fifty riflemen lurk in ambush. The house next to it is full of warriors, and so are the first three houses on the other side of the street. ”

“Why tell me this?” snapped Gordon, his temper frayed thin by anxiety. “Can I not see the dogs crouching behind the parapets of the roofs?”

“Aye! The men in the orchard and in the garden will not fire until the Afghans have passed beyond them and are between the houses further on. Then the riflemen on the roofs will fire into them from each side and the men in the orchard and in the garden will rake their rear flanks. Not a man will escape.”

“If I could only warn them!” muttered Gordon.

The Kurd waved his hand toward the palace, and the roof of the nearest house, from which even then rifles were cracking from time to time.

“Bagheela would not leave you unguarded. At least a score of men still watch the tower. You would be riddled before you could get half-way across the garden.”

“God! Must I stand here helpless and see my friends slaughtered?” The veins stood out on Gordon’s neck and his black eyes took on a red tinge. Then he crouched suddenly like a panther poised for a spring as firing burst out at the other end of the town. He shouted, a deep, fierce shout of exultation.

“Look! The Afghans are spreading out and taking cover! Baber Khan is a crafty old wolf. Yar Ali Khan might rush headlong into a city he knew nothing about—not Baber Khan!”

It was true. Baber Khan, suspicious as a gaunt old wolf, had mistrusted the appearance of that innocent-looking street. Perhaps his caution had been whetted by the lessening of the firing at the other end of the town, which he had heard as he mounted the Stair. Perhaps his flinty eyes had caught the glitter of the rising sun on rifle barrels on the roofs. At any rate his three hundred warriors spread out in a long skirmish line, firing from behind boulders and from the natural pockets that pitted the rocky plain.

A scattering fire was returned from the nearest house-tops, but no shot was fired from the garden or in the orchard, and the shooting from the roofs was weak and ineffective.

“Look!”

A band of men, a hundred or so in number, emerged into the street from among the houses. They moved in ragged order out along the road, firing as they went. Gordon cursed suddenly and passionately, for he foresaw the trick. The Kurds craning over his shoulders wagged their turbans in confirmation.

“They go to draw the Afghans into a charge. They will fall back in confusion presently. There was never an Afghan who could resist pursuing a fleeing enemy. The Ghilzais will run into the trap set for them, after all.”

The nearest point of the Afghan line was a few hundred yards beyond the orchard. The Ismailians had scarcely passed the orchard when they received a withering fire from the full length of the irregular line, and their uneven ranks wavered as a dozen men fell. They held long enough to fire a volley in return, and then began to fall back. The bodies that dotted the plain showed that the Ismailians were prepared to pay a fair price for their ultimate victory.

The wolf-like yelling of the Afghans came plainly to the group in the tower as the Assassins broke and fled toward the shelter of the houses. Just as the Kurd had predicted and Gordon had feared, the Ghilzais leaped up and charged after them, firing as they ran and howling like blood-mad demons.

They converged from both sides into the road, and there, though Baber Khan was unable to check their headlong rush, he did at least manage to beat and curse them into a more compact body as they surged into the end of the street.

The fleetest of the tribesmen were not a hundred yards behind the last-most Ismailians when the latter dashed between the orchard and the garden and raced on up the street. Gordon clenched his hands until his nails bit blood from his palms. Now the foremost of the Afghans were passing the further end of the garden—a few moments more and they would be in the jaws of the trap.

But something went wrong. Later Gordon learned that it was a turbaned head poked incautiously up above the garden wall that spoiled Ivan’s trap. Baber Khan, with eyes that missed nothing, spied that head, and the bullet he instantly smashed through it caused the owner to jerk the trigger of his cocked rifle even as he died. At the crack of his rifle his mates, keyed to almost unbearable tension, fired mechanically and practically involuntarily. And the men in the orchard across the way, reacting without stopping to think, poured a ragged volley into the onrushing horde. And of course, at that, the men on the roofs ahead began firing spontaneously and without orders. When a trap that is hinged with hair-trigger precision is sprung prematurely, the result is always demoralization and confusion.

A score of Afghans bit the dust at the first volley, but Baber Khan instantly realized the trap and saw and took the only way out. The unexpected fire was like a slap of cold water in the faces of his men, sobering them out of their blind blood-madness, and before that could turn to panic, Baber Khan commanded their staggering attention by a high­pitched furious yell, and wheeling, led them straight at the orchard wall. They were accustomed, since their cradles, blindly to follow where he led. They followed him now, with the bullets from all sides ripping through their ranks.

A volley that blazed along the wall full in their faces left a line of crumpled bodies in the road but did not stop the charge. They went over the orchard wall like a typhoon­driven wave in the teeth of raking lead and biting steel, swamped the fifty men crouching there with sheer numbers, shot, stabbed or knocked them in the head before they could even break away, and then, from behind the wall themselves opened a savage fire on the garden and the houses.

In an instant the whole complextion of the fight had changed. The road was full of dead men, but, at a loss of some forty warriors, Baber Khan had slipped out of the trap before it could close.

The Ghilzais were well covered by the wall, and the trees which crowded the orchard. Lead rained into the orchard from the garden across the way, and from the roofs of the houses, but with little effect. There were fountains in the orchard for water, and fruit on some of the trees. Unless dislodged by a direct charge, they could hold their position for days.

On the other hand, they were themselves in a vice. They could not take the city by sniping from behind an orchard wall, and if they emerged from their cover, they would be exterminated. They could not charge the houses, and they could not fall back across the plain and descend the Stair without being followed and massacred as they retreated. Continual firing from the houses would gradually decrease their numbers, until a charge would sweep over the wall and crush them as they had crushed the fifty riflemen who had first held the orchard.

And in the meantime, Gordon reflected savagely, he was hemmed up there in that accursed tower, while the men who had come to rescue him fought for their lives against a crafty and merciless foe. Tigerishly he paced the floor, his eyes burning, his hands quivering with the desire to be gripping gun butt or sword hilt. Azizun knelt near the wall, watching him with wide eyes, and the Kurds were silent.

The spattering of bullets on the tower outside maddened him. They were not shooting at anything they could see; were simply warning him to keep under cover; to remain hemmed in until Ivan Konaszevski could exterminate his friends and return to destroy him at his leisure. A red mist floated before Gordon’s eyes, making everything seem to swim in a gulf of blood.

He scarcely knew it when one of the Kurds wandered down into the lower chamber; but he was aware of the man’s return, for he came up the steps three at a time, his eyes blazing.

“Effendi! Come and look! I tore the carpet off the floor of that chamber down there looking for loot, which often is hidden beneath floors, and I found a brass ring set in a slot. When I pulled upon it a trap-door opened in the floor, and a flight of stone-steps leads down!”

Gordon came out of his maze of helpless rage like an awakening panther, and raced headlong down the stair after the warrior. An instant later he was crouching over the open trap, striking one of the matches he had found in the upper chamber. The steps led down a few feet into a narrow tunnel. Gordon knelt in meditation while the match flickered out.

“That tunnel leads toward the palace,” he said presently. “If Ivan knew of this he’d have led his men through it to attack us. Othman must have used this way in passing secretly to and from the palace. He’d naturally have secrets he’d keep even from Ivan. It’s probable that only he and his black slaves knew of this tunnel; which means that no living men except ourselves know of it.”

“We do not know where it leads to in the palace,” reminded the Kurd.

“No. But it’s worth taking a chance. Get the others.” When the three Kurds came trooping down with the girl, hugging her make-shift silk garment about her, he said briefly: “I’m gambling that this will lead us into some part of the palace that isn’t full of Assassins. There can’t be many men in the palace, and they are in the front part of the building, judging from the sound of the firing. Anyway, it’s better to take a chance than to wait here to be butchered.

“If we get into the palace alive, we’ll make for the tunnel where Yusuf ibn Suleiman is hiding. There’s no point in his waiting there now, but of course he probably doesn’t know that. If we get there I’m going to send you men and the girl out through the ravines.” And in a few words he told them how to reach the cave and the hole in the cliff.

“We do not wish to leave thee, effendi!” Weariness and wounds were telling on the Kurds at last; their bearded faces were drawn and haggard, but they spoke with sincerity.

“You’ll obey my orders, as you swore to do, and so will Azizun—” as the girl showed evidences of mutiny. “You know the way to Khor. Go there, and give the people the same pass-word I told to Yusuf. Don’t be afraid in going through the ravines. The djinnis dead—and it was never anything but an ape, anyway. If you reach Khor, get into communication with Azizun’s family in Delhi. They’ll pay you well for returning her.”

“The dogs pollute their Hindu money! Thy command is enough. But, effendi, what of thee?”

“After you’ve gotten safely into the ravines I’m going to slip out of the palace and try to reach the orchard where the Afghans are at bay. They came to save me. I cannot desert them. It is a point of izzat. ”

He used the Afghan term unconsciously, but the Kurds understood; they too had their code of honour.

“I tell you this now, so if I fall before we reach the tunnel where Yusuf is, the rest of you will know what to do. Make for Khor! And now let’s go!”

They entered the tunnel, lighting their way with improvised torches. It was ornate for such a passage, walled with friezed marble, arched and tiled. It ran straight for some distance, until Gordon knew they were well under the palace. He was wondering if it connected with the dungeons when they came to a narrow flight of steps leading up to a bronze door. Careful listening betrayed no sound beyond the door, and Gordon pushed it open cautiously, rifle ready. They emerged into an empty chamber, of which the secret door formed a panel in the wall. When Gordon pushed it shut behind them a hidden spring clicked. Their escape was cut off in that direction.

They stole across the chamber and peered through the curtained door into the dim corridor beyond. No sound broke the silence of the palace except the dry cracking of rifles some distance away. It was the men in the front part of the building shooting at the tower. Gordon smiled thinly to think that while the riflemen were so engaged, the folk they thought safely trapped were invading the palace behind them.

“Do you know exactly where we are now, Azizun?”

“Yes, sahib.”

“Then lead us to the room which opens on the secret stair. There’s no use warning everyone to go quietly.”

“I do not think we will be discovered. The male slaves will be at the other end of the town, watching the fighting. The women, slaves and houris, will be hiding in terror in the upper chambers—possibly locked in by their masters,” replied Azizun, leading them swiftly along the winding corridor.

She was apparently correct in her surmise, for they reached the door of the chamber which Gordon had occupied the day before without seeing anyone. But even as Gordon reached for the door, their hearts jumped into their throats at the mutter of low voices and the soft tread of many feet in the chamber. It was as unexpected as a shot from ambush. Before they could retreat the door was thrown open, and then Gordon’s rifle muzzle jammed hard against the belly of the man who opened it.

For an instant both men stood frozen.

“Sahib!”

“Lal Singh!”

The Kurds behind Gordon stared wildly as they saw the great bearded Sikh throw his arms about their effendi in an embrace of glad relief. Behind Lal Singh Yusuf ibn Suleiman in his Arab finery grinned like a bearded mountain devil, and fifty wild figures with rifles and tulwars crowded the chamber.

“I feared you were dead,” Gordon said a bit unsteadily.

“I deserve to be, because I failed in my mission,” said the Sikh contritely. “I should have reached the Gorge of the Kings before the Ghilzais. Sahib, at the western foot of the crags which surround this plateau, I came upon an old road-bed—the old caravan road which once ran through this country from Persia to India. It turns northward along the foot of the crags and comes into the Gorge of the Kings a mile or so to the west of the cleft where you killed the Mongol.

“It was easy going after I struck the road—but as I climbed down toward it I slipped and fell and struck my head against a rock. I must have lain senseless for hours. When I came to myself and pressed on, and reached the Gorge of the Kings, it was already dawn, and the Ghilzais, who had almost killed their horses in an all-night ride, had already passed through the cleft. I came upon their horses which they had left in the gorge, with some boys to watch them. They told me that Yar Ali Khan had used your rope to get upon the ledge that hides the mouth of the cleft, and had gotten through the door and shot the man guarding the cleft before the fellow knew the Afridi was near him. The secrets of these Assassins have been safe for so long, the fools have grown careless. Not even your entry of the city put them on their guard. They never guessed that men would follow you.

“Well, even as I started to follow the Ghilzais through the cleft, I heard firing from a point I knew to be the summit of the cliffs. I knew they were already on the plateau, for the firing receded as I listened. While I hesitated, not knowing what to do, and cursing myself for my failure to reach them in time, these fifty men rode into the gorge, following the Ghilzais. They are Waziris whom Baber Khan allowed to establish their village a few miles from Khor; hearing the Ghilzais were at war, they followed to aid in the fighting—and the looting. Seeing no better course I brought them with me, as you had planned for me to bring the main force of the Ghilzais. The horses were tired, but even so we made good time, for we followed the old road-bed to a point within half a mile from the hole where I crawled through the cliff. And now we await your orders!”

“Shabash!” exclaimed Gordon. “There is man’s work for us all.”

“What has occurred, sahib?” the Sikh asked eagerly, while the wild Waziris, who had followed him merely because they knew him to be El Borak’s comrade, crowded close eagerly. “We heard firing all the way, but of course could see nothing. And this Kurd, who opened the door for us, knows no more than we.”

“The Ghilzais hold the orchard at the other end of the town,” Gordon answered. “Later I will tell you of the battle; now there is work to do in haste.” Turning to the three Kurds, he said: “Do you three men do as I have instructed you. Lal Singh, tell them where you left the Waziri horses.“ This done, Gordon added: “Ride to Khor and wait for us. If the battle goes against us, I charge you to see that Azizun gets safely home.”

They salaamed silently; the girl would have clung to him and wept, but there was not time, even for a woman’s tears. At his word the Kurds picked her up bodily though with clumsy gentleness, and bore her weeping through the secret panel.

“And now out of this palace,” said Gordon. “We’re going to get in the fighting, but it will do Baber Khan no good for us to be hemmed up in that orchard with him. We’re going to try to make that garden across the road from the orchard—you know the plan of the city, Lal Singh. From that point we can rake the houses on the other side of the street, and be in position to flank any charge that tries to come down the street. Come on!”

Gordon set off along a corridor down which Musa had guided him the day before when he led him to be confronted by Ivan Konaszevski. The fifty tribesmen followed him, incongruous with their wild faces and ragged garments in that setting of rich tapestry and polished tile.

They peered about suspiciously at the sound of the rifles at the front of the palace, cracking away like an anti­climax. A few moments later Gordon led them into the hallway from which he had escaped the day before. The window still showed the bent, hacked bars, the balcony displayed the splintered lattice. He paused a moment on the balcony, pointing out his plan to Lal Singh and the crowding tribesmen who pricked their ears for every word uttered by El Borak, as jewels dropped by an almost mythical hero.

“You see how the gardens lie in a solid rank west of the houses, separated only by walls between? The trees grow thick. If we skirt those gardens, keeping close to the western walls, our chances of being seen by anyone in the houses will be slight. I believe we can come up behind the Garden of the Egyptian without being discovered: the Assassins will all be looking the other way. I don’t know how many men are in the Garden of the Egyptian, but a surprise attack from the rear ought to clear it. Come on now—through this broken lattice and over that wall. Nobody’s watching this side of the palace.”

Man after man they dropped from the balcony, raced after him across the garden and slid over the wall from which he had tumbled into the ravine. They found themselves on the bare rocky plain which ran to the palace wall at that point; but a few moments later they had followed the wall around and darted across the space that separated it from the first of the city-gardens.

The steady firing at the other end of the street indicated that the fighting was raging fiercely. Hundreds of rifles barking together made a deafening racket and Gordon winced at the thought of the storm of lead that must be sweeping through the orchard. It would take bloody toll of the defenders, despite the Ghilzais’ skill at taking advantage of every bit of cover. But at least the noise covered his advance. With all that racket going on at the north end of the town, nobody would be very likely to be watching in the other direction.

And such must have been the case, for no alarm was raised as the swift and furtive band glided along the western edge of the gardens, bending low to keep beneath the wall as much as possible.

As they approached the north end of the street possibilities for discovery increased, yet at the same time the attention of their enemies in that part of the town was fixed even more absolutely in the other direction. And though Gordon and his followers could not know it, events were shaping for a typhoonic climax.

Chapter Ten

The Bloody Angle

Ivan Konaszevski, who had been directing the battle from the roof of the third house on the east side of the street, had already realized that it would take a charge in force to regain the orchard. He was a prey to doubts and uncertainties. He feared that reinforcements were expected by the Afghans, to defend the Stair against which he would have to divide his forces. He was haunted by the fear that Gordon, though trapped in the tower, might find a way to outwit the men who had been stationed to keep him there. The Cossack did not fear Gordon personally, but he sweated profusely at the thought of depending on wits less keen than his own to keep the American out of the fight. He feared that if the fight dragged on until nightfall, the Afghans might make a sally under cover of darkness and get into the houses near-by, from which it would be all but impossible to dislodge them. He feared the demoralizing effect of a long drawn-out battle on his men, whom he was already feeding hashish and whiskey to fire their zeal.

So though he would rather have waited until the Afghan force had been decimated by hours of sniping by hidden marksmen, he decided to wind up the feud in a blaze of blood and glory. The taking of the orchard by the Ghilzais had shown that a small force could not hold the comparatively low wall against a determined charge of superior numbers.

Leaving a few score riflemen on the roofs to keep the men in the orchard busy, Konaszevski drew most of his men out of the house, and gathered them, four hundred strong, in the space between the third and fourth houses on the east side of the street, out of sight of the beleaguered Afghans. He detached a force of a hundred men to steal through the gardens that lay on the east side of the town and charge the orchard from the east at the auspicious moment, while he led three hundred hemp-maddened fanatics straight down the street, against the southwestern angle of the orchard-wall.

The Cossack knew they would be protected by the houses up to the last few hundred feet, where a bare space separated the last house on that side from the orchard. Ivan knew that many men would die in that open space, but he believed enough men would survive to sweep over the wall in spite of the defenders’ fire. And dead warriors could always be replaced; human life was the cheapest commodity in the Hills. Ivan was ready to sacrifice three-fourths of his army if it took that to crush the invaders.

The charge was signalled by a deafening roar from a dozen long bronze trumpets in the hands of Ivan’s Mongols. That maddening sound smote the ears of Gordon and his Waziris just as they slid, undetected over the unguarded western wall of the Garden of the Egyptian. They were just raising their rifles to aim at the bare score of Assassins who crouched along the eastern wail, firing at the orchard across the way, and oblivious to anything behind them. That outrageous brazen clamor momentarily stunned and paralyzed them, and then a perfect hell-burst of yells followed the trumpets, and a mass of frenzied, weapon-brandishing humanity burst from between the houses across the way and swept up the street like a foaming torrent.

The men on the roofs and in the garden laid down a perfect barrage along the orchard wall, and all hell seemed bursting at once.

It was a moment where everything depended on a hair­trigger decision. And Gordon rose to the occasion, just as Baber Khan had risen earlier in the day. His eager but bewildered Waziris could not hear the order he shouted, but they understood him when he threw his rifle to his shoulder. In that raging hurricane of sound, the volley which cut down the twenty riflemen along the garden wall passed unnoticed. Those Assassins died looking the other way, without knowing what hit them. A few seconds later their slayers were kneeling among their bodies, sighting over the wall in their place. The men still on the roofs, firing madly over the heads of their charging comrades, never knew what had taken place in the Garden of the Egyptian.

The Waziris had not yet reached the east wall when the frothing horde swept past the last house and lunged toward the orchard. A fearful volley met them; the wall was lined by jetting spurts of flame and smoke rolled up in a cloud. The whole first rank went down. In an instant the road was carpeted with dead men: Ivan had counted on the momentum of that headlong charge to carry it over the open space, but even his fanatics faltered in the tearing teeth of that blast. They reeled and wavered.

But at that moment the hundred Ismailians who had circled through the gardens reached the east wall of the orchard and found it unguarded, because the Ghilzais had been forced to concentrate their forces in the southwest angle to meet the charge. Ivan had counted on that, too; but he had overlooked the density of the trees through which the hundred warriors would have to fire. So their valley into the backs of the men along the southwest walls, while murderous, was not as devastating as he had hoped it would be.

Nevertheless it staggered the Ghilzais, and in that moment, as their fire wavered, the maddened Ismailians in the road sent up a roar that burst the very ear-drums of battle, and surged irresistibly on the barrier. It was at that instant that Gordon and his Waziris opened fire from behind them. A whole line of men dropped, shot in the back, but the rush was not checked in the slightest. Like a roaring wave the Assassins rolled against the wall and locked with the defenders. Rifles poked over the wall from either side were fired full into snarling faces. Tulwars lunged up or hacked down. Men were dragged from the wall into the road, men scrambling up on the wall from without tumbled or were knocked over into the orchard. The Ismailians, trampling their dead and dying underfoot, clustered in a straining, heaving mass against the wall, those in front crushed upon it by the pressure of those behind. They swarmed upon the barrier fighting like furies, and as fast as they fell others took their place from the shrieking horde.

The Waziris in the garden fired again and again, and their slugs ripped into the rear flank of the mob, reaping a grisly harvest. But the frenzied horde was like a man who is so blood-madly intent on killing the foe before him that he is not aware that a knife is being plunged again, again into his back.

The hundred Ismailians in the orchard came tearing through the trees to fall on the rear of the Ghilzais with knife and rifle-butt. Gordon’s Waziris, carried beyond themselves, leaped the garden wall and hurled themselves at the backs of the horde before the orchard, clubbing and stabbing. And the riflemen on the roofs deserted their posts to rush into the road and add their fury to the general frenzy.

It was at this moment that the wall gave way under the impact of hurtling tons of straining human flesh, and the red tides which had been foaming against the barrier on each side flowed together and mingled in an awful welter.

After that there was no semblance of order or plan, no chance to obey commands and no time to give them. It was all blind, gasping, sweating butchery, hand-to-hand, blood splashing the blossoms and straining feet stamping the grass to shreds. Mixed and mingled inextricably, the heaving mass of fighters surged and eddied all over the orchard and flooded the road. The firing ceased, gave way to the crunch of clubbed rifle butts and the rip of stabbing blades. There was not much difference in the numbers of the rival hordes now, for the losses of the Batinis had been appalling. The outcome hung in the balance and no man knew how the general battle was going. Each man was too busy with his own individual problem of keeping a whole skin and killing the man next to him to be able to see what was going on about him.

Even Gordon, whose brain generally functioned crystal-clear in the reddest rages of battle, could obtain no distinct conception of that fight—the most savage of all the myriad unrecorded and unnamed battles fought out in the mystery of the Hills to decide the fate of empires.

He did not waste his breath trying to command order out of chaos. Craft and strategy had gone by the board; the fight would be decided by sheer man-power and individual ferocity. Hemmed in by howling madmen, with no one to listen to orders if he gave them, and no breath to give them in any event, there was nothing to do but break as many heads as he could and let the gods of chance decide the general issue.

Gordon remembered firing his last shot point-blank into a wild face. Then he clubbed his rifle and smote and smote and smote until the world became strange and red and hazy and he almost lost even his individuality in the tumult about him.

He knew—without being conscious that he knew—that Lal Singh fought on one side of him and Yusuf ibn Suleiman on the other; and behind them, all who were left of the Waziris hung doggedly at his heels, swinging dripping tulwars.

And then suddenly, as a fog thins when the wind strikes it, the battle was beginning to thin out, knotted masses splitting and melting into groups and individuals. Gordon knew that one side or the other was giving way; men were turning their backs to the slaughter. It was the Batinis who wavered, the madness inspired by the hemp they had eaten beginning to die out. Without the drug their fury was less absolute than the desperation of the Hillmen who knew they must conquer to survive. Besides, the Ismailians were a mongrel throng, lacking the racial unity of the Afghans.

But the break did not come all at once. The edges of the battle crumbled away, but in the midst of the orchard the stubbornest fight of the whole day swirled and eddied about a dense clump of trees where the fiercest fighters of Shalizahr made their stand with their backs to the trees.

Gordon led his men that way, hacking through the loose lines of individual combats. He saw a glitter of gilded corselets among a wave of sheepskin coats, and Yusuf ibn Suleiman croaked something, and sprang away from his side, toward a plumed helmet which waved above the turbans.

And then Gordon saw Ivan Konaszevski. The Cossack was stripped to the waist, his cord-like muscles quivering and knotting to the lightning play of the sabre in his hand. His dark eyes blazed and his thin lips wore a reckless smile. Three dead Ghilzais lay at his feet and his sabre kept half a dozen blades in play at once. Right and left of him corseleted Arabs and squat Mongols in lacquered leather smote and wrestled breast to breast with wild Ghilzai swordsmen. And into this carnage Gordon’s Waziris hurled themselves howling like wolves.

Gordon saw Yar Ali Khan for the first time, looming above the mob as he glutted his berserk fury in stupendous blows. And he saw Baber Khan—reeling out of the melee, covered with blood. Gordon began beating his way through to Konaszevski.

Ivan laughed, with a wild gleam in his dark eyes, as he saw the American coming toward him. Blood streamed down Gordon’s muscular breast, coursed in tiny rivulets down his corded brown arms. The butt of his clubbed rifle was clotted with blood and brains.

“Come and die, El Borak!” laughed Ivan, and Gordon crouched for a charge, swinging the rifle butt above his head. “Nay, sahib, take this!” And Lal Singh thrust into his hand the hilt of his dripping sabre. El Borak straightened, shook his head to clear it, and came in as a Cossack would come, in a blazing whirl of action. Ivan sprang to meet him, and they fought as Cossacks fight, both attacking simultaneously, stroke raining on stroke too swiftly for the eye to follow them. Time might have turned back three hundred years to a duel between Zaporoghian swordsmen on the shores of the Dneiper.

And in a circle about them the panting, blood-stained warriors ceased their own work of slaughter to stare at the sight of two western warriors settling the destiny of the East between them!

“Aie!”It was a cry from a hundred throats as Gordon stumbled, lost contact with the Cossack blade.

Ivan cried out ringingly, whirled up his sword—and felt Gordon’s sabre in his heart before he realized the American had tricked him. He fell heavily, wrenching the hilt from Gordon’s hand. He was dead before he struck the ground, his thin lips twisted in a smile of bitter self-mockery.

Gordon was stooping to regain his sword when a shot cracked back among the trees; he stooped even lower as if to kneel to the dead man—and pitched suddenly across the corpse, blood oozing from his head. He did not hear the maddened yell that rose up to the hot blue skies, nor see the headlong rush of the frothing Afghans as they stormed past him and hurled themselves at the throats of their enemies.

Gordon’s first sensation of returning consciousness was a lack of sensation—a numbness that held him helpless. He seemed to lie in soft darkness. Then he heard voices, mumbling and incoherent at first, growing more distinct as life grew stronger in him: He began to distinguish the voices, and to recognize them. One was Yar Ali Khan’s, and he was startled to realize that the giant was weeping—blubbering vociferously and without shame.

“Aie! Ahai! Ohee! He is dead! His brains are pouring out of that hole in his head! Oh, my brother! Oh, prince of slayers! Oh, king among men! Oh, El Borak! Dead, for a mob of ragged hill-bastards! He whose smallest fingernail was worth more than all the Ghilzai horse-thieves in the Himalayas!”

“He is not dead, Allah curse you! And how are the Ghilzais to blame? My warriors lie dead by scores!” That was Baber Khan.

“Ohai! Would they had all died, and thou with them, aye, and I too, if so El Borak could have been saved alive.”

“Oh, hush that ox-bellowing and hand me that bandage!” that was Lal Singh. “I tell you, his wound is not mortal. The bullet but grazed his skull, knocking him senseless, curse the cowardly Batini who fired it.”

“I split the dog’s skull,” blubbered Yar Ali Khan. “But that can not restore life to our sahib. Here is the bandage. Sikhs have no hearts. They are a breed without bowels of compassion. Your friend and brother lies there dying, and you shed no tear! Nay, you mock me for my woe! By Allah, were it not that grief unmans me, I’d give you something to weep about!”

Gordon’s awakening senses were then aware of a throbbing in his head, which was eased somewhat under the manipulation of strong, gentle, skilful fingers that applied something wet and cool. The darkness cleared from his brain and eyes, and he looked up into the anxious faces of his friends.

“Sahib!” cried Lal Singh joyously. “Look, Baber Khan, he opens his eyes! Ali, if you were not blinded by those idiotic tears, you would see that El Borak lives, and is conscious!”

“Sahib!” yelled the great hairy cutthroat, and forthwith fell to weeping for joy.

Gordon lifted his bandaged head, and set his teeth as the movement started it to throbbing agonizingly again. He was lying in a corner of the orchard wall, and a peach tree bent its branches over him, green leaves against blue sky, and blossoms raining petals about him in a soft shower as the breeze blew. But the air reeked of fresh-spilt blood; there was blood on the grass, and a dead man lying face down a few yards away.

The orchard was strangely quiet after the noise of battle, but he thought he heard men screaming somewhere in the distance. He could not be sure, for the roaring inside his head.

“What happened?” he mumbled. “Is Ivan dead?”

“Dead as man can be with a sabre through his heart, sahib,” answered Lal Singh. “The devil himself would have bitten at the trick you played on the Cossack. My own heart was in my mouth when you seemed to stumble. A Batini skulking among the trees shot you an instant later. But the heart was gone out of the Assassins, and our Afghans went stark mad when they saw you fall. They fell on the Ismailians with a fury that could not be withstood, and those sons of dogs gave way and fled in every direction—those who lived to flee. Even now the Ghilzais harry them up and down the street. Hearken!”

Gordon stared at Baber Khan. “I feared you were slain. ”

The chief grinned wryly. His beard was clotted with blood from a cut on the neck, and his leg was stuck out stiffly before him as he sat leaning against the wall.

“A bullet in the thigh. It is nothing. We feared you were dead.”

“Ha!” Yar Ali Khan smoothed his beard and stared scornfully at his friends. “Old women! Sahib, you should have heard them bellowing over you! Wallah! Did I not bid you cease your unmanly weeping? Did I not tell you that El Borak’s head was too hard for a bullet to break? Where are your manners? The sahib perhaps has orders!”

Gordon struggled up to a sitting position and stared out over the orchard. What he saw there shook even his iron nerves. It was a garden of corpses. The dead lay like fallen leaves in wind-blown heaps and mounds and straggling lines. In the bloody angle and in the road outside the bodies were piled three deep, among the ruins of the wall.

“God!” For a moment Gordon was speechless, his soul in revolt. “Baber Khan, send someone after your warriors. Ali will go. Tell them to stop the slaughter. Enough men have died. Tell them to spare all who will lay down their arms and surrender. And another thing—there are many captive women in Shalizahr who are not to be harmed. I intend to return them to their homes.”

Yar Ali Khan swaggered off importantly to carry the orders, just as another man approached. Yusuf ibn Suleiman came toward Gordon, holding a broken scimitar. He spoke with difficulty because he had been slashed across the mouth and the bubbling blood choked him.

“Effendi, my sword broke with the last stroke, but it was enough. Muhammad ibn Ahmed lies yonder among the corpses of his corseleted dogs. He will never insult a mountain-Kurd again. Have I not kept faith, El Borak?”

“You have kept faith. But why ask me that question? I never expected anything but that you would keep faith.”

Yusuf sighed deeply and seated himself cross-legged beneath the tree, the broken sword across his knees.

A low moaning began to make itself manifest over the orchard—the wounded crying for water. Gordon grasped Lal Singh’s shoulder and rose stiffly.

“Baber Khan, we’ve got to get the wounded into the houses and do what we can for them. The women can help. I can stand alone, Lal Singh, and in a few minutes I’ll be able to walk without help. You and Yusuf go to the nearest canal and bring water.”

As the men set out, Gordon supported himself by grasping a peach limb; he had not yet fully recovered from the paralyzing shock of that bullet-wound. His legs still felt numb.

“I have been thinking while sitting here holding a broken leg, El Borak,” said Baber Khan. “This city is easier to defend than Khor; with Ghilzai warriors guarding the outer cleft and the Stair, not even the Amir’s field-pieces could take Shalizahr. I will send for the women and children and we will hold this plateau. Stay with us, El Borak, and rule beside me! We will build a kingdom here!”

“Are you touched with the madness that has led to the slaughter of hundreds this day?” retorted Gordon. “You see to what doom a like ambition has led the rulers of Shalizahr. They too plotted a kingdom among these hills.”

“But the Amir has doomed me anyway!”

“You need not fear his displeasure now! Any man who has freed him of the fear of the Triple-Bladed Dagger is sure of the Amir’s pardon, regardless of his past offenses. My head upon it! Why do you think I summoned you to help me take this city? Merely to aid my own interests? You know me better than that. I knew that if we stamped out this nest of cobras together, it would win you the Amir’s pardon.”

Baber Khan sighed lustily.

“The sword is lifted from my neck by your words, El Borak. I have had no love for the life of an outlaw, but I was caught in a web of lies.”

“We have broken that web. But at a bitter price. I wish it could have been done at lesser cost of brave men.”

“All would have died, and me with them, if the Amir had come against us, as he planned,” grunted Baber Khan. “Those who died, died as a Ghilzai wishes to die. And there will be loot for the living, and the women of the dead.”

“Let’s don’t be too hasty about plundering. We’ll have to deliver the city to the officers of the Amir, but I think I can persuade him to make you governor of the city. With these Ismailite thieves replaced by decent citizens from other parts of the kingdom, this will make a city of which any king should be proud. The Amir will wish to reward me for my part in this affair. I will ask him to place you in charge of the city. Governor of Shalizahr—how does that sound, Baber Khan?”

“Your generosity shames me,” said the Afghan chief, tugging at his beard in his deep emotion. “But what will you do, El Borak? You have provided for everyone except yourself.”

“Well, just now I’m going to take water to those poor devils out there, and tie up their wounds the best I can. I see Lal Singh and Yusuf coming with water, and my legs are alive again.”

“My men are coming back into the orchard. Let them do it. You are weary and wounded; you have been fighting all day, and all last night!”

“I can help. I’m alright. A few hours sleep tonight will make a fresh man of me. Dawn must find me on my way.”

“Whither, in the name of Allah?” ejaculated Baber Khan.

“First to Khor, to pick up Azizun. Then to Kabul to tell the Amir what has occurred, and secure your pardon and appointment as Governor of Shalizahr.”

“You will return to Shalizahr with it?”

“I’ll send Lal Singh back with the Amir’s escort. I have business in India.”

“Allaho akbar! Is there is no rest or quiet about you? You are like a hawk roaming ever before the wind. What will you do in India?”

“I’ve got to take Azizun toDelhi. And I have a score to settle in Peshawar with a fat swine named Ditta Ram. Three years ago he murdered a friend of mine. I never could prove it, and another friend, an English official, begged me for his sake not to take the law into my own hands. I’ve been waiting three years for the dog to make a slip, and now he’s made it, and I can prove he’s made it. He’s put himself outside the protection of the law, and I’m going to settle that old score.”

“Allah!” marvelled Baber Khan. “And they say we Afghans are a relentless breed!”

He was still shaking his head in wonder as Gordon limped away, a hand outstretched for the jugs of water Lal Singh and Yusuf ibn Suleiman were bringing across the orchard.

Index